iPad/iPhone:

On your iPad: Select “Sign In” from your toolbar. Select “Create an Account” from the available options. On your iPhone: Select Settings icon in toolbar. Select “I have a Print Subscription” under Preferences.

Eagle-eyed Apple fans noticed something unusual when the company released the third generation of the iPad in the spring of last year. The device was actually thicker and heavier than its predecessor—seemingly a step backward. The culprit was a 70 per cent increase in the size of its lithium-ion battery packs, needed to power the new iPad’s higher-resolution display and faster processor, while still offering the roughly 10 hours of battery life users had come to expect.

Such trade-offs are becoming increasingly common, thanks to a dearth of battery innovation that threatens to hold up further mobile innovation. While Moore’s law observes that the number of transistors on a silicon microchip can be doubled every two years, cramming more computing power into an ever-shrinking space, the last major step forward in rechargeable batteries occurred in the early 1990s, when the first lithium-ion cells were introduced. Since then, engineers have gone to great lengths to find ways of powering new mobile features—touchscreens, video cameras, ultra-bright displays—using roughly the same amount of juice. “The batteries have improved maybe by a factor of 2.5, while the power consumption of devices has probably been decreased by about 20 times,” says Jeff Dahn, a battery researcher and professor at Halifax’s Dalhousie University.

But there’s a limit to how far power-rationing can go. And these days, rechargeable batteries are being called on to light up far more than just feature-rich cellphones and tablets. They are also being used to power automobiles and the critical on-board systems of jetliners such as Boeing’s new 787, where the price of failure is much higher. Merely stringing together more lithium-ion cells to achieve the necessary oomph isn’t without risk, either. Boeing was forced to ground its entire fleet of 787s earlier this year after a series of fires were traced to the plane’s battery packs. Similarly, two people were taken to hospital last year after an electric car battery exploded in a General Motors lab.

Why does it seem so hard to build a better battery? For one thing, batteries are based on chemistry, meaning researchers are somewhat limited by what they find in the periodic table. By some estimates, today’s rechargeable batteries are only about eight times more powerful than the very first lead acid battery invented by Gaston Plante in 1859. And, according to Dahn, a further threefold improvement is probably the best researchers can hope for. “Now, some people wouldn’t consider that a quantum leap, but in batteries, it is,” Dahn says. “Even 25 per cent is a big deal in the battery business.” And, despite the money now being poured into battery research, even that could prove far more difficult to achieve than most people imagine.

Last fall, the U.S. Department of Energy said it was spending $120 million to create a new Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, or JCESR, comprised of five universities and five national labs. Based at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill., the project even has a catchy mission statement, promising to develop batteries that are “five times more powerful, five times cheaper within five years.” Yet, those involved in the project are quick to point out that it’s more of a rallying cry than an actual goal. “That’s an incredibly high bar,” says Linda Nazar, a chemistry professor at the University of Waterloo and the Canada Research Chair in solid state materials. “We know that.”

At its most basic, a rechargeable battery works by moving ions back and forth between an anode and a cathode via an electrolyte. In the case of lithium-ion cells, a lithium transition metal is used for the cathode, and graphite is used for the anode. During discharge, lithium ions are released from the anode and move through the electrolyte to the cathode, simultaneously releasing an electron that creates a current that powers whatever device is connected to the battery. When plugged into a wall outlet, the process goes in reverse.

In theory, the most powerful battery should be one that’s made from the most reactive elements: lithium and fluorine. But building a battery out of elemental fluorine, which can react explosively with a wide variety of substances, would be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible. So battery researchers are left trying to find more suitable compounds that still offer the desired characteristics in energy density (how much energy can be stored per unit of volume), voltage and overall stability of the cell. To further complicate matters, they must also contend with a host of unwanted chemical reactions that can cause cells to degrade over time, which is why rechargeable batteries eventually die completely. “What helps you in terms of the high energy of these molecules also hurts you,” says Venkat Srinivasan, a battery researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Lab and the deputy director at JCESR.

The reason lithium-ion batteries became so popular is that they seemed to offer the fewest trade-offs. Compared to nickel metahydride and nickel-cadmium batteries, they boast a relatively high energy density, no cell “memory” (where a periodic complete discharge of the battery is necessary to maintain its full capacity) and a low rate of self-discharge when not in use. But lithium-ion batteries have their disadvantages, too. They are prone to overheating—hence the stories of cellphones and laptops that spontaneously combust—and tend to age quickly, with most having a lifespan of about three years.

Lithium-ion’s downsides have become a particular headache for makers of electric cars. The Chevy Volt’s image suffered after GM was forced to recall 8,000 vehicles in 2012 after crash tests resulted in battery-related fires. As for degradation, the solution all automakers have come up with—bigger battery packs—has only seemed to add to the risk. “When the car is new, you promise buyers a certain amount of electric range. For the Chevy Volt it’s 60 km,” Dahn says. “But when the car is eight years old, you still promise that 60 km of electric range. The problem is that, throughout the lifetime of the car, the battery is constantly degrading. That’s why you have a 16-kW-h battery in the Volt, even though, when the car is new, you only need nine (kilowatt hours).”

Figuring out a way to extend the life of a lithium-ion battery is key. But it’s a painstakingly slow process of trial and error. “We know that just adding a pinch of a certain chemical to the electrolyte can have amazing impact on a battery’s lifetime,” Dahn says. “But why? And how long is it going to take for us to evaluate the others and the multitudinous combinations of them all?” In an attempt to speed things up, Dahn has developed a system that allows automakers to test different “recipes” of battery materials to see how they’re likely to perform over the lifetime of a vehicle. So far, GM and Magna International’s electric car division have signed on to use the system. At JCESR, meanwhile, researchers are using supercomputers to comb a giant database called the Materials Project in search of promising substances that could be incorporated into future battery designs.

But what if lithium-ion batteries simply aren’t sufficient to meet the world’s future energy storage needs? “Most of the battery people have concluded we can double the energy density of what we have today,” Srinivasan says. “The problem is that doubling may not be enough.”

Many researchers at JCESR and elsewhere are therefore also exploring other battery types that, if successful, promise to leapfrog lithium-ion on a number of fronts—perhaps even one day rivalling the energy density of fossil fuels. (Gasoline has an energy density that’s roughly 100 times that of a lithium-ion battery.) One line of inquiry looks at elements like magnesium, which carries a two-electron charge compared to just one for lithium, adding that much more energy potential. But there’s a catch. The ions don’t move around as easily inside the cell, suggesting that new electrolytes and electrodes will need to be found.

Another area being explored is the use of cheap, abundant elements such as sulphur and oxygen. That includes the lithium-air battery, an idea that has been kicked around for years. The attraction is that the battery would be extremely lightweight, since the oxygen in the cell would come from the air. More important, it boasts a theoretical energy density rivalling that of gasoline. But while IBM has built a prototype, and other permutations such as sodium-air and zinc-air are being explored, most experts believe it will be years before such batteries could be rolled out commercially, if at all. “There are a lot of side reactions that occur in this cell,” says the University of Waterloo’s Nazar.

Dahn has a different vision. Instead of abandoning lithium-ion cells completely, he believes there’s a way to make them more powerful by charging them beyond their current 4.2-V maximum. “Many of the positive electrodes can still have a lot of lithium in them at 4.2 V, so if you can charge them to 4.7 V, they will give you about 50 per cent more capacity and energy,” he says. There is, as always, a caveat. “The electrolytes in the cells don’t like being exposed to these highly oxidizing surfaces when the voltages go above 4.2 or 4.3 volts,” Dahn says. “We just need to fix this one nagging and very difficult problem and then we’re there.” In the meantime, don’t expect your iPad to get any thinner.

Shares of Apple, formerly the world’s most valuable company, have lost more than a third of their value since September, tumbling from a high of US$705 to below US$450. Investors are concerned that Apple has suddenly lost its mojo just as competition facing its flagship product—the iPhone—mounts. Last week’s quarterly results, though not shabby by any stretch ($13.1 billion in profit on $54.5 billion in sales), did little to change anybody’s mind. Analysts were hoping to have their expectations surpassed. Instead they were barely met.

But just because Wall Street is experiencing a crisis of confidence doesn’t mean Apple should, too. The runaway success of the iPhone, which accounts for nearly half of Apple’s sales, has spawned a host of imitators. Korea’s Samsung, in particular, has managed to capture 30 per cent of the global smartphone market (compared to Apple’s 21 per cent), thanks to an impressive lineup of iPhone-like devices—several of which sell for less than the iPhone’s $700 price tag. In China, the iPhone is even being outsold by devices made by a local company called Coolpad.

Many observers are now suggesting Apple should respond with a cheaper iPhone. But such a strategy is far from foolproof. Apple’s business is based on building better products, not cheaper ones—hence its industry-leading profit margins. The famously secretive company is offering few clues as to its intentions. A recent report in a Chinese newspaper quoted Apple marketing head Phil Schiller saying the company would not make a cheaper phone just to boost market share. It was later revised to say that Apple’s goal is to make “the best products” and would “never blindly pursue market share.”

Either way, the market’s concerns about Apple’s future seem overwrought. RBC analysts Amit Daryanani and Mark Sue argued in a recent report that Apple, far from being in dire straits, is simply making the “shift to a more normal growth company.” Then again, Apple might just keep doing what it’s best at: developing game-changing new products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Yesterday Apple posted the largest quarterly profit in the company’s history, and still somehow managed to disappoint investors. The stock was down nearly 11% this morning, with analysts citing myriad reasons for disappointment: slowing growth, lower-than-expected iPhone sales and the launch of the iPad Mini, which offers slimmer profit margins than its full-size compatriot.

Now, let’s be clear: Apple is not a company in crisis. It sold 47.8 million iPhones in the last quarter, a 78% improvement over the previous year, and sold 7.5 million more iPads over this Christmas season than it did the previous one. But any expectation the company could maintain this kind of skyrocketing growth indefinitely is—and always was—unrealistic. If Apple’s growth for the next five years matched what it’s done in the past five, the company’s revenue would hit $1.2 trillion, according to a recent report by A.M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research—roughly equal to the GDP of Australia. Unless investors expect Apple to start printing its own currency and opening embassies, they need to accept an inevitable slowdown in growth.

Apple cannot afford to simply stare at its balance sheet and assume everything is fine. Research in Motion made a similar mistake, assuming their customers would stay loyal and their profits would stay healthy, even as warning signs mounted around them. Indeed, Apple is banking on the same consumer devotion to its products as RIM once did. “At Apple, it’s important to us that we make products that customers not just like, but love,” CEO Tim Cook told analysts yesterday.

Part of that fraying is the fault of the company, no doubt. But it also has to do with a general shift in the digital world. Apple has always made beautiful objects, but consumers now expect their gadgets to play well together. The new expectation is that we can, say, download a song on your phone, and then stream it to your stereo. Or store our photos in the cloud and view them on our tablets or TVs. This is a great idea, in theory, and one that Apple is clearly chasing. The company’s iCloud service, which now has 250 million users, is intended to provide this seamless experience. Anyone who’s used it, however, knows that the reality is far from it, requiring plenty of fiddling with menus and network settings. For the company that built its reputation on “It just works,” this is a serious problem.

Apple garnered love by selling fuss-free products. That’s a considerable challenge even when you’re building a single device. The challenge becomes exponentially greater with each phone, tablet and laptop added to the equation. And further, Apple has long relied on a “Halo effect,” where consumers enamoured with their iPhone decide they might love an iMac as well. But if those two devices don’t communicate, it creates a temptation to look elsewhere instead.

Apple’s short-term health seems assured. But unless it can make cloud computing and networking as elegant as it once made the iPhone, it won’t be feeling the love forever.

With concerns mounting about slowing growth and increased competition from rivals, Apple investors were hoping the iPhone—and iPad—maker would blow the doors off of its first quarter financial results. But while the Cupertino, Calif. company came close, it didn’t quite meet Wall Street’s expectations.

Apple reported earnings of $13.1 billion (U.S.) in the first quarter, about the same as what it earned during the same period last year. But investors were focused on Apple’s $54.5 billion in sales, which was less than the $54.9 billion that was expected by analysts. Another key figure—profit margin—also came in below the Street’s expectations at 38.6 per cent instead of 39.5 per cent, suggesting Apple’s ability to command a premium price for its products in the face of competition from rivals like Samsung is slipping faster than anticipated. Shares of Apple dropped below $500 in after-market trading. The stock has fallen by 26 per cent since September.

As for device sales, Apple said it sold 47.8 million iPhones, 22.9 million iPads, 4.1 million Macs and 12.7 million iPods in the quarter.

CEO Tim Cook reminded analysts on a conference call that Apple remains an impressive story, noting that it has so far sold well over half a billion devices running its mobile iOS platform. He also took on rumours that demand for the iPhone, which accounts for nearly half of all sales, was faltering amid reports it had cut orders for parts from some of its suppliers. “The supply chain is very complex,” Cook said, adding that it would be a mistake to try to interpret a single piece of data, even if it’s accurate, as being representative of Apple’s broader business. He also said initial iPhone 5 sales were constrained by Apple’s ability to make them quickly enough.

Apple is still an impressive company with impressive prospects. But investors have grown accustomed to being dazzled. Good simply isn’t good enough anymore.

Yes, $250, the expected starting price of the new iPad Mini (or Air), is also the going Craigslist rate for used 1st generation iPads. It’s tomorrow’s price today, and as a bonus you’ll get a full-sized screen. If it’s scratched, you can probably haggle it down to $230. You’ll meet an interesting new person, and you won’t pay taxes.

Hate me yet?

Sorry everybody, but there’s no better time than right before a Cupertino product announcement to troll Apple fans question society’s troubling devotion to the Apple cult. I’ve been called a partisan for suggesting Android tablets as an alternative to the pricey and constraining iPad, so let me clear the record by stating definitively that the iPad remains, by a small margin, the best tablet computer I’ve used. The problem is, none of the advancements since the first iPad have improved the experience much, while the sticker-price has yet to rationalize.

After a decade of technological innovation, Apple is now coasting on fumes, offering minor upgrades or pointless variations in increasingly transparent efforts to keep the product cycle spinning. Whereas once their products changed our lives, they are now marketed in Apple-speak as revolutionizing only themselves. iPhone 5, as the slogan goes, is ”the biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone.” Not since the Smurfs smurfed us very much has a product degenerated into such nauseating solipsism.

So: is the world clamouring for smaller tablet computers? Not really. But there exists a huge untapped market for cheaper tablets, which Apple doesn’t want to surrender to Android or anyone else. Without cannibalizing their own top-tier iPads, they are set to offer a down-market product in the form of the iPad Mini, which it seems Apple is slashing its profit margin on.

It’s an aggressive move to bring new markets (educational and developing nations included) into the Apple fold, where they will be constrained from buying music, apps, movies and books that are not sold by Apple.

As an independent critic who doesn’t get kickbacks (or even product loans, for God’s sakes) from any tech company, far be it for me to advertise for the competition by suggesting that an open alternative like Android might be the way to go.

Instead: if you want a cheaper iPad, by all means, buy an old iPad. It’s the best iPad to iPad iPad since iPad.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/250-ipad-now-available/feed/11Apple wants the iPad to be the next must-have business toolhttp://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/apple-wants-the-ipad-to-be-the-next-must-have-business-tool/
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/apple-wants-the-ipad-to-be-the-next-must-have-business-tool/#commentsTue, 15 May 2012 13:58:01 +0000Gabriela Perdomohttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=257851That means developing more business apps, and taking on RIM

After only two years in the market, Apple’s iPad has been a remarkable success, cornering 68 per cent of the global tablet market, with 11.8 million units sold in the first quarter of 2012 alone. But to really secure its place as the king of tablets—and to prove its device is more than just a consumer toy for Web browsing and playing games—Apple is planning to conquer one final frontier: the business world.

The company has launched an aggressive global campaign to lure developers into building more business applications for the iPad. One of the centres of this push is Vancouver, home to a thriving community of software companies that have created successful consumer apps for Apple’s iOS platform, used on the iPhone and iPad. Apple is organizing regular developer meet-ups in the city with thousands of participants and inviting software companies to showcase their business apps to sales staff at Apple stores.

Angela Robert is CEO of Vancouver-based Conquer Mobile, one of the companies that is now focusing solely on developing business apps for the iPad, like Colligo Briefcase, which helps view, share, and edit content in a secure environment. Robert says she’s never seen Apple come after developers so aggressively. (With consumer apps, it was usually developers courting Apple.) She says the current offering of business apps is, so far, insufficient to convince company decision-makers that they need iPads. “It’s just like [Apple] did with the iPhones,” says Robert. “People bought iPhones only after they saw all they could do with apps.”

About 90 per cent of all apps in the iTunes store are consumer apps, such as magazines and video games. For Apple to break into the enterprise world, there needs to be thousands more applications designed with businesses in mind. “There’s a lot to be done by Apple and the developers,” says Kevin Restivo, a senior mobile industry analyst at International DataCorporation in Toronto. He thinks business apps that will change the game for iPad have not been invented yet. Apple offers a line of productivity software on the iPad, called iWork, though big-name business software products and custom software designed to run complex systems like inventory management aren’t widely available. “There are a lot of glorified calculators out there,” says Restivo.

Developers like Robert dream of workers on oil rigs armed with iPads, checking on machinery and reporting back in real time to managers using video and live data; or executives bringing their iPads to meetings already loaded with company financials rather than with bulky printouts. Apps developed by Vancouver companies already in the market include FusionPipe, a secure cloud computing system that allows employees to access corporate resources from virtual servers; and the popular HootSuite, a social media management system for businesses and organizations to collaboratively organize campaigns across multiple social networks.

Apple’s new-found enthusiasm for the enterprise market could be a troubling development for Canada’s Research In Motion, whose market share has been plummeting and whose tablet, the PlayBook, has been a flop thus far. Apple is threatening to erode RIM’s last foothold, the business market, which it once dominated. RIM is by no means giving up its turf easily. The company is set to unveil a new version of the PlayBook later this year, and it is also courting software firms to fill its own app store with offerings for businesses. It has told developers they will earn $10,000 in their first year on the app store. If they fall short RIM will pay them the balance.

Robert is convinced that Apple, and companies like her own, are standing at the doorstep of a major boom in business apps. A report released by Deloitte this year noted the “app economy” will be worth $2 billion by 2015 in the U.S. “More and more companies are asking software developers to create apps for them,” she says. “As they see their competitors starting to come up with their own apps, they’re starting to wonder, ‘Do I need an app?’ ” Major companies like Accenture, SAP and IBM have started commissioning business apps so that they, in turn, may offer mobile solutions to the large organizations they already offer services to.

It’s not just big corporations that could be giving out iPads to their employees. Jim Secord is the CEO of Vancouver-based Kashoo, which makes an app for small businesses called Kashoo Accounting. It helps people track expenses, send invoices and create financial reports. “The iPad is ideally suited for small businesses,” he says, because it’s portable, user-friendly, and inexpensive. The iPad’s portability is key because it is liberating business owners, who usually have to run errands throughout the day, from having to return to their office or home to do paperwork.

There is still plenty of room for growth. Analysts like Restivo think Apple has yet to evolve from consumer-targeted apps, and are skeptical about how fast and effective this push into the business world will be. Some believe RIM could maintain its hold. Despite a difficult year, it still has long-standing relationships with business clients, while Apple is only getting started.

Restivo thinks Apple’s move into the enterprise market does present a threat to RIM, but says we’re still in the early stages of the race. “There will be a winner in the enterprise world when it comes to tablet adoption,” he says, “and Apple is jumping over the first hurdle of that race right now, placing it very much in first place.” And Secord, Kashoo’s CEO, believes Apple has a well-calculated game plan for its iPad and business apps. “All along,” he says, “Apple knew this is where they wanted to go.”

The Kindle Touch starts shipping to Canada today. Having been given a run-through of the new e-reader at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle earlier this week, and having had the chance to put it through its paces since, this is good news for book lovers.

As its name implies, the Kindle Touch finally adds the long-missing functionality of a touch screen to Amazon’s e-reader. I’d often chuckle while watching people try to flip pages on previous Kindles by swiping the screen, only to see nothing happen. Mind you, I now sometimes have the same experience watching children swiping TV screens. How quickly the world has changed.

Anyway, other e-readers, such as the Kobo, have had touch screens for a while, so this isn’t really anything new. What I like about the Kindle Touch, though, is its “Easy Reach” feature, which makes 90 per cent of the screen an active next-page area. So, if you’re left-handed and holding the device with one hand, you don’t have to stretch your thumb all the way to the right to turn the page. You can touch the middle instead.

The remaining 10 per cent, around the edges of the screen, is for going back. Kindle director Jay Marine told me this was done because readers only rarely want to go backward in their books.

E-ink touch screens are tricky to do, he added, because they’re not as quick at refreshing as LCD tablet screens. So, if you’re looking at book cover images in the Kindle store, for example, they may take a few seconds to load. That’s why, although e-ink readers have come a long way since the original Kindle in 2007, there’s still plenty of innovation to be done.

“We have lots of ideas. Some are possible in the near future, some are possible in the long future. It would be wrong to assume we’re even close to being done,” he said.

Marine wouldn’t tell me what those ideas are, but he did note that although most existing customer concerns have by now been dealt with, that’s not how Amazon is approaching Kindle design.

“You can’t rely on customers to tell you what to go do next all of the time. You can ask them what problems they’re having but it’s not their job to invent for you.”

The Touch’s other main new innovation is a cool feature called X-Ray, which calls up a reference history for certain words in the book. So, let’s say you’ve read half the book and then stepped away from it for a few weeks, and then when you start reading again you can’t remember who the characters are. X-Ray brings up a list of mentions of that character and a synopsis of who he or she is. You then have the option to go back and reread those portions or plug onwards if your mind has been satisfactorily refreshed.

X-Ray is something of a crowd-sourced tool in that it pulls information from social book cataloging site Shelfari and Wikipedia. Marine says it’s the “dictionary of the future.”

“It makes sense because it’s knowable information. People know who the characters are, so why can’t we embed that in the book?” he said. “Once people try it, they don’t like to go back to not having it because it is super helpful.”

The other thing I like about Kindles, and not just the Touch specifically, is that most of Amazon’s e-books have real page numbers. Marine explained that the company scans and links physical books to e-books, so that the page numbers in both match regardless of the e-book’s font size. This is a feature introduced specifically for book clubs and people who need page numbers for citations. If you’re writing a book, like I am, this is tremendously helpful.

Other than that, the Kindle Touch has many of the nice specs of its predecessors. It’s super light, holds 3,000 books and reportedly has a two-month battery life. I obviously haven’t tested that claim, although as with previous Kindles, the Touch will only approach that if its wireless capabilities are turned off.

Speaking of which, the Wi-Fi-only version sells for $139 while the 3G unit goes for $189. Judging by some questions I’ve heard, there is some confusion about the 3G version. Unlike other electronics, such as tablets or portable game consoles, no separate wireless subscription is necessary with the 3G Kindle. Amazon has worked out deals with wireless carriers around the world that allow its devices to use their networks for transmitting books. 3G Kindle owners, therefore, can buy all the books they want without ever having to worry about data bills or subscriptions.

That, to me, is the Kindle’s biggest advantage over other e-readers. There’s just no beating the ability to get a book almost anywhere you are, whenever you want without having to worry about finding a Wi-Fi connection. That makes the extra $50 for the 3G version very worthwhile.

All in all, for people who prefer to read their e-books on “old-fashioned” e-ink devices rather than tablets, there’s no doubt the Kindle Touch is the cream of the crop.

I saw the most frightening thing last week while I was heading down to New Orleans. The fellow who was sitting across the aisle from me on the plane was browsing through photos on his iPhone. I casually glanced down at his device only to see an entirely unexpected and different kind of device: a picture of fully nude man lying on a bed, his junk displayed in its full glory.

I quickly looked away in silent chastisement. That’s what I get for nosing around, I told myself.

The shock of what I’d seen eventually faded and was soon replaced by thoughts about an issue I’ve been considering for a while, and one that would be crystallized upon my returning home this week–that for all its elegant products, Apple’s iTunes is a giant mess.

It has always been particularly bad with photos, with the man on the plane possibly serving as a great example. My seeing those goods may not even have been his fault. Perhaps he’s a little kinky–I’m not here to judge–and the photo somehow ended up on his phone. It’s easy enough to accidentally sync photos you don’t want from your computer onto your mobile devices.

Worse still is that the man probably doesn’t know how to get the photo off his iPhone. The device’s photo app certainly won’t let you trash it. You can easily delete pics snapped by the phone itself, but the only way I know of to eliminate photos that originated on a computer is to first trash them on that machine, then sync the iPhone to it. Which is really counter-intuitive.

I had a related problem when I sat down to organize my wedding photos. I had some pictures on memory cards and others on my iPad, where they had been transferred to, which brought up the question of which computer to sync to. My iPad is synced to my main desktop, but my laptop has a more up-to-date operating system and version of iPhoto, Apple’s photo management software. However, if I synced to the laptop, I was afraid the iPad would lose all the music and movies stored on the desktop.

This is where the fabled cloud–or in Apple’s case, iCloud–is supposed to come in. The cloud is supposed to bring us respite from this problem of media management across devices. Just upload all your stuff into the electronic ether, then access it from whatever device you want.

That’s fine, except like I said, my older desktop–the one with most of my life’s media on it–doesn’t qualify for iCloud. The solution I came up with was to upload all my photos to Flickr (I purchased a pro account for unlimited storage), then download them to my desktop for editing and organizing. And, as if all that wasn’t insane enough, ultimately I ended up re-syncing them to the iPad.

I’m not the only one who thinks this is madness. Jason Snell, editorial director at Macworld, also thinks it’s time for Apple to right its “syncing ship.” While iTunes may have started a decade ago as a digital jukebox, today it’s the central media management hub for scores of people. “Apple has packed almost everything involving media (and app) management, purchase, and playback into this single app. It’s bursting at the seams. It’s a complete mess. And it’s time for an overhaul,” Snell writes.

Yes please. If our curiosity can’t keep us from unnecessarily seeing other people’s penises, the software on our technology should.

All incoming first-years enrolled in full-time post-secondary programs at Collège Boréal in Sudbury, Ont will receive iPads for the start of the 2012 school year. The Northern Ontario School of Medicine, also in Sudbury, handed out iPads to each student starting in September 2010.

It’s easy to see the appeal. Writing notes by hand is a pain. You have to print lecture slides out ahead of time, transport them, and then (if your penmanship is anything like mine) scribble all over them. That’s why many of us bring laptops.

But laptops have drawbacks too. Unlike a good-old-fashioned spiral bound notebook, you have to worry about the battery life. Tablets like the iPad are—in the words of Hannah Montana—the best of both worlds. They’re small, easy to transport, and have longer-lasting batteries.

For students at Boréal, iPads will also allow direct access to content from the Tembec Resource Centre, which includes over 10,000 digitized documents, plus other educational applications. (Presumably, the ‘educational’ distinction rules out things like the toilet paper rolling app.)

The iPad isn’t just being embraced because of its convenience; the initiative also supports Collège Boréal’s environmental efforts. A semester’s worth of course notes is a lot of paper. If a few more schools embraced the iPad, it could save a small forest.

It’s not just university students getting in on the iPad action: educators in Auburn, Maine, started instructing 266 kindergarteners using the tablet this fall. Personally, I wouldn’t trust a kid who’s still in the safety-scissor stage with a piece of $500 tech, but either way, Apple’s big push for digital classrooms, by allowing teachers to publish books and create apps, appears to be working.

Even orangutans at the Toronto Zoo may soon get tablets to help stimulate their brains and prevent the boredom of captivity. Orangutan Outreach, a conservation group leading the ‘Apps for Apes’ program, told Maclean’s that the Toronto Zoo is at the “top of the list” for donated iPads.

Yes, that’s right—a monkey in the Toronto Zoo could soon be beating your high score on Tetris.

Not everyone is convinced about the tablet’s educational worth. ”iPads are marvellous tools to engage kids, but then the novelty wears off and you get into hard-core issues of teaching and learning,” Larry Cuban, a Stanford University professor emeritus, told The New York Times.

There are also fears that students may become too ‘reliant’ on the iPad, with instantly accessible glossaries and flashcards acting as crutches.

Of course, when the Internet came out, similar arguments were made. In reality, the convenience of the internet means that students can spend less time searching through library shelves, and more time studying and applying the information they find.

That’s why I believe digital tablets hold endless possibilities for the classroom. In fact, I just thought of another: When your professor says, “I’m not going to test you on this—-it’s just for your own information,” you could boot up Tetris on your iPad and show that Orangutan who’s boss.

Scott Dobson-Mitchell studies at the University of Waterloo. Follow @ScottyDobson on Twitter.

The three orangutans at the Milwaukee County Zoo have a new toy. Once a week, zookeeper Trish Khan brings out an old iPad for them to play with. “I downloaded a bunch of apps I thought might interest them,” she says. One favourite is Doodle Buddy, a fingerpainting program; they also like apps that turn the iPad into an instrument that can be tapped like a drum or strummed like a guitar. “They love to watch videos,” she says. The adult female, MJ, “loves David Attenborough,” who makes natural history films. Khan carefully holds up the iPad instead of handing it over; the ape could easily break it in half.

Milwaukee’s project has been such a hit that zoos across North America, including Toronto, are clamouring to get some. “We’ve got about 20 zoos waiting,” says Richard Zimmerman, director of the non-profit Orangutan Outreach, which is running a campaign called Apps for Apes that aims to get more tablet computers to zoos. Eventually orangutans in different zoos will be able to visit each other via Skype or FaceTime—maybe even start Internet dating. “Orangutans have to move zoos for mating,” says York University’s Suzanne MacDonald, who studies animal behaviour and cognition. “It would be really cool if they could meet over the Internet first and see if they got along, or if they’re terrified of each other.”

Milwaukee got its first iPad almost by accident. “Our gorilla keeper was on Facebook and saw a picture of a gorilla on an iPad,” Khan says. “She commented, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I could get my gorillas an iPad?’ So a gentleman who’d just bought a brand new one gave his older one to the gorillas.” The zoo now has four split between gorillas and orangutans, but orangutans seem to prefer them. “Gorillas have a different way of interacting,” MacDonald says. “They look at things sideways, because it’s a threat to look at it directly. Orangutans like to look directly at things and figure them out.”

MacDonald has been using touchscreen computers with the Toronto Zoo’s orangutans for more than 15 years; she uses a computer inside a wooden box, so the apes don’t break the machine or turn it off.

Computers are ideal for studies because they’re objective. “If a human is there to judge, sometimes we want the animal to succeed,” which skews the data. Working with the Toronto Zoo’s six orangutans, she’s trying to learn how other primates view the world. “Orangutans can use computers, so we can ask them questions about how things look to a different brain. It’s hard to do that with an antelope.”

In different experiments, MacDonald and her team are looking into whether an orangutan can tell the difference between photos of a gorilla, a human, and another orangutan; how good their eyesight is; and even whether they enjoy listening to music. MacDonald is about to start a new experiment where she’ll expose them to different kinds of music—rock, hip hop, classical, even Tibetan throat singing—to see if they have a preference. Using the touchscreen computer, orangutans will be able to keep playing a song if they like it, or turn it off if they don’t.

When MacDonald first got the touchscreen, “we assumed they’d use their fingers,” she says, “but we showed the young adolescent male a picture of an adult male orangutan, and he turned his back on it. He went away, found a stick, came back, and touched the screen with a stick, not with his finger. All the other orangutans saw this, and they wanted to do it like that too.”

The iPad has all sorts of potential for research. “We want to continue with these experiments, and start on some novel ones, like hooking up orangutans at different zoos,” MacDonald says. “We don’t know for sure if they’ll recognize each other over Skype.” Mahal, the youngest orangutan in Milwaukee, loves to watch video of other young orangutans.

Once more zoos have orangutan-proofed iPads, the idea is to let them choose videos, pictures to look at, and apps. “It’s educational for the public, too,” Khan says, “to see some of their intelligence come out. Hopefully it will create more interest in trying to save the species.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/theres-an-ape-for-that/feed/73Samsung’s Galaxy Note: between smartphone and iPad?http://www.macleans.ca/authors/peter-nowak/samsungs-note-filling-the-space-between-smartphone-and-ipad/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/peter-nowak/samsungs-note-filling-the-space-between-smartphone-and-ipad/#commentsFri, 03 Feb 2012 21:45:32 +0000Peter Nowakhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=237729It's basically an oversized phone you can scribble on–and it may just take off

Remember when the iPad first came out and Apple touted it as the device that would fill the void between smartphone and laptop? The jokes came along pretty quickly about how long it would be till someone tried to squeeze something more into the space between smartphones and tablets.

Well, laugh no more because Samsung is going there.

The South Korean electronics giant is spending a pile of money on a 90-second commercial during Sunday’s Super Bowl to promote its new Galaxy Note, a weird device that launches in Canada on all three big wireless carriers on Feb. 14.

When I first saw the company show off the Note at its Consumer Electronics Show press conference in early January, I snickered, mostly because the person demonstrating it whipped out a stylus. You know, that obsolete relic of a pre-historic age in which touchscreens were unresponsive and needed plastic pointers to work properly?

Regardless, I sat down for a briefing with Samsung Canada executives this week and they tried to sell me on the thing. Firstly, to my relief, the stylus is intended to be purely complementary. The Note features the same responsive touchscreen as any other Android phones; the plastic pointer is completely optional, although if you’re not going to use it, there really isn’t any sense in getting the Note–any other regular smartphone will do.

Samsung decided to bring back the stylus, the execs told me, because humans still haven’t eliminated the need to write and scribble things. The point was not lost on me as I jotted down what was being said in my (paper) notebook. The Note therefore has a number of features that take advantage of this fact. For one, pressing a button on the stylus and then touching the screen with it results in an instant screen grab, which can then be written on right away. This can be done in any application, whether it’s a website, map or video. The grabs are saved as images, which can then be shared with others in a variety of ways, such as email.

Taking a picture, writing on it and then sending it strikes me as a very economical way to communicate–better than typing in many instances. Here are a few examples (the first is a map, the second a YouTube clip):

The Note has other stylus-enabled apps too, including a basic notepad for writing stuff down. You can also open up documents such as PowerPoint presentations, write on them and save them, then send them off. And finally, Samsung is also opening up the stylus function to outside developers, who will be able to create their own apps either through the Android Market or the company’s own sub-store.

Put all that together and the business applications are clear. The one thought that kept occurring to me during the briefing was that this is exactly the sort of thing Research In Motion needs to be incorporating into its next generation of BlackBerry devices. Like many observers, I’m bracing for the worst when RIM’s new phones arrive later this year–the worst being devices that are just like everyone else’s. Samsung’s stylus idea may be kooky, but it works and it may just take off.

The company is also aiming the Note at artists, where the uses are also clear. Check out the sketch that a professional artist did of me during the briefing. (Trust me, I look more handsome in this picture than in real life.)

There’s one big catch with the Note, though: It’s giant. With a 5.3-inch screen, it’s not much smaller than Samsung’s smallest seven-inch tablet. It’s too big to fit into your front pants pocket and I really don’t like putting it in my back pocket, for fear of it falling out or breaking when I sit down. That means it’s intended for an inside coat pocket or purse, which seems to almost aim it at people who wear suits by default.

In the end, Samsung sold me on the stylus, but I’m not so sure about the size. While I can see the productivity benefits to carrying this thing around, I can also see my friends mocking me when I pull out a ginormous phone to make a call. It would be almost as silly as holding an iPad to my ear.

I do have to hand it to Samsung for experimenting. I’ve been wondering for a while now whether smartphones have peaked and/or stagnated–are we just going to see incremental improvements in processors and screen resolutions from now on? It’s good to see someone is still trying new things, regardless of whether they pan out or not.

Steve Jobs’ plans to take on the textbook market appear to be working. In the three days after the Thursday launch of Apple iBooks Author software for iPads, more than 90,000 users downloaded it.

On top of that, more than 350,000 textbooks were downloaded from its new textbook category in iBooks, which started selling textbooks from major publishers priced at $14.99 or less.

Apple hasn’t revealed any official numbers yet, so Mashablewarns that the figures, from Global Equities Research, are unconfirmed.

Still, the iBooks Author software represents the biggest opportunity for a shakeup in the textbook market long dominated by expensive publishers.

E-textbooks have saved students some money in recent years, but not as much as anticipated. Publishers argue that’s because much of the expense is in paying authors for content, rather than costs for printing or distribution, which can be nearly eliminated with e-texts.

But iBooks Author makes it easy for educators to create and share their own electronic content, for free or for low prices. Professors, anyone really, can build textbooks using templates that include multimedia content. They can publish their creations in iBookstore or export them using PDFs.

iBooks Author isn’t the first example of how professors are embraced iPads in the classroom. There are more than 20,000 education-related applications already available for the iPad.

LectureTools is one such application that is already being used in dozens of classrooms at the University of Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.

LectureTools allows professors to present slides that show up on every student’s iPad or laptop, while students can annotate the slides, collaborate on visual problems and ask a questions anonymously as they go. It also allows students to participate in their classes remotely.

The $519 starting price of the iPad 2 could be viewed as an obstacle to any textbook revolution. But at $14.99 or less for new e-textbooks, students could end up saving money if they no longer need any paper texts. Paper texts can cost students more than $100 apiece or $1,000 per year.

Before his death on Oct. 5, 2011, Apple founder Steve Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson that he believed he could disrupt the $8-billion-a-year textbook industry, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Away from the hype that surrounds some of the hottest Internet companies in Silicon Valley, scores of developers are tackling the lucrative, accelerating sector of technology for children. “Backpacks will slowly shrink… Textbooks will pretty soon be delivered on tablets,” says Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children’s Technology Review, a publication that since 1993 has been tracking new releases and trends in this increasingly busy domain. “It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”

The boom in technology designed around children’s needs was catalyzed by the launch of Apple’s iPad in 2010, says Buckleitner, a former teacher with a Ph.D. in educational psychology. The tablet, he says, was the first reasonably priced device to bring together the must-have features of a blockbuster piece of hardware for kids: wireless Internet connection, powerful batteries, an App Store that has galvanized independent developers as well as those working within companies, and a large multi-touch screen.

“We knew that magic happens when you put touchscreens in the hands of children,” says Emil Ovemar, producer and co-founder of Toca Boca (which means ‘touch mouth’ in Spanish), a maker of games for Apple devices within Bonnier, a large Swedish media conglomerate with yearly revenues of almost US$4 billion. The work-and-play philosophy behind Apple devices seems to fit particularly well with the way children operate. “The most natural way to learn something is through play,” notes Ovemar.

Most parents seem to agree. Kids Industries–a marketing agency that targets the family marketplace–found that 77 per cent of 2,200 parents it surveyed in the U.S. and U.K. believe that interacting with a tablet helps their children develop creative thinking and gain problem-solving skills.

The magic, in fact, was already at play–even before the iPad–in touch-screen phones. Another recent study by Kids Industries found that while only nine per cent of pre-school children in different countries can tie their shoes, about 20 per cent can play an app on a smartphone.

No wonder app developers are starting to focus on children. Ovemar and colleagues create games revolving around everyday activities like cutting hair, cooking or serving tea. In their most recent game, named Toca Kitchen, the user can drag a variety of foods from the fridge to the kitchen, cook them and swipe them into the mouth of one of four characters. Toca Boca launched the first of the 10 games now for sale in Apple’s App Store in March 2011. Since then, the apps have been downloaded 4.8 million times–although often for free. They are most popular in Sweden and in anglophone countries (Canada is the company’s fifth biggest market,) but fare well also in the Middle East too.

The children’s app market is so young, few have set out to measure how big it may be, the Financial Times notes. But the study on moms and dads in the U.S. and U.K. by Kids Industries found that parents download around 27 apps a year on average for their children. Pare that with estimates that sales of tablets will skyrocket to over 63 million this year, and it’s easy to see the potential.

Admittedly, the growing jungle of apps poses challenges for parents struggling to discover the best products and keep up with the pace of innovation. But Ovemar predicts it’s schools that will struggle the most along the app-laden learning curve. “I don’t think schools are ready to handle the generation that grows up with touchscreens. There will be a huge mismatch,” he says.

Buckleitner, though, is convinced that pedagogues from past centuries, like Maria Montessori or Friedrich Fröbel (the inventor of the kindergarten), would have embraced the new wealth of hardware and software for children with enthusiasm. “I think Montessori would say to not give a child an iPad is a form of neglect,” he says. “Who doesn’t want a child to learn to read? Well guess what, there’s 50 apps right now that make words into toys, where a child’s finger can drive language.”

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod in 2001, he did something that would have been counterintuitive for any other consumer-product company CEO: he showed the back of it first. “I’m in love with it,” he said of the elegant, shiny surface reflecting the Apple logo in matte relief. “It’s stainless steel; it’s really, really durable. It’s beautiful.” By then Apple devotees expected such attention to detail from the man in the black mock turtleneck who took computers from geek to chic—the imperative was embedded in his company’s very DNA.

In his 2009 TED lecture talk about inspirational leadership, Simon Sinek observed that Apple challenged the status quo and expressed its ability to think differently precisely by making products that are consistently “beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly.” And certainly the public’s appetite for innovative, human products is reflected in consumers’ willingness to pay a premium for Apple products. But Jobs’s greatest design legacy was reframing its parameters in the mass market. As he told the New York Times in 2003, Apple didn’t see design as product veneer: “That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.”

The iPod, coveted to the point of theft, exemplified Apple’s fusion of function and form: the technology was revolutionary (“You can put your entire playlist in your pocket,” Jobs boasted), yet every user touch point was carefully considered to be familiar and seem pleasing—its gift-like packaging, playing-card proportions, intuitive scroll wheel, even the tiny clip that prevented its distinctive white earbuds cord from tangling when it was packed up. The Museum of Modern Art put an iPod in its collection and extols the device for raising expectations for all consumer products—and also “stimulating manufacturers to recognize the importance of good design and to incorporate design considerations at the highest levels of their corporate structures.”

Designers bow before Apple’s thoughtful, minimalist aesthetic: “Every aspect is considered—the ergonomics, the feel, the touch,” says Toronto industrial designer David Didur. “The magic is the technology.” New York-based designer Peter Buchanan-Smith lauds Apple for “technology that feels designed by human beings.” He recalls his wonder over the touch-activated zoom feature of the iPhone introduced in 2007. “It was like a child turning on the tap for the first time.”

Apple’s design enabled design, says New York City art director, designer and typographer Steve Heller. “It changed our way of living. Before the Mac, I did everything by hand.” Paris-based designer Jean François Porchez of Typofonderie believes the Mac, with its black-type-on-white screen, multiple typefaces and proportionately spaced fonts (all Jobs’s directives), ushered in a design revolution: “In terms of democratizing design it was every bit as significant as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press,” he says. Buchanan-Smith, who teaches design, sees the Mac’s innovations as double-edged: “You have instantaneous access to publish and design and do whatever you want. But it’s so easy to go from A to Z without much struggle. You don’t want to struggle with a tool, but you want some creative struggle.”

“Steve always had a high standard for design and how things should look—far more than most heads of companies manufacturing things,” says Chicago designer Rob Janoff, who, in 1977 created Apple’s logo. Janoff recalls Jobs showing up at his Silicon Valley advertising agency with the plastic Apple II, the company’s first computer. “He was proud that it looked like it belonged in a kitchen, like a food processor.” Jobs wanted a friendly logo, he says: “He wanted kids to respond to it and to get it into schools.” Janoff’s hand-drawn apple (made universally identifiable with a bite removed) rendered in colourful stripes won approval in its first draft, he says.

That was unusual, given Jobs’s renowned micromanaging of every step of the design process; his name appears on more than 300 patents, from the iPad to the supports used for the glass stairs in Apple stores. Jobs always presented himself as an exemplar, not originator. “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas,” he admitted in the documentary Triumph of the Nerds. Apple didn’t invent the mouse, that was Xerox, but it made its use intuitive. Its magnetic plug on computers was used on deep fryers first; Apple just made it sleeker. And the company’s aesthetic under Jonathan Ive, head of Apple’s design group since 1986, owes a huge debt to Dieter Rams’s design in the 1960s for Braun electronics and appliances. But it was Jobs’s radical vision to liberate computers from programmers and their beige boxes—literally with the candy-hued iMac, his first design win after returning to Apple in 1997. Many followed: titanium and aluminum iBooks, even sleeker MacBook Air envelopes, the huggable iPad that emerged as the must-have accessory at Paris fashion week.

In a 2006 Newsweek interview, Jobs compared Apple’s design process to peeling an onion: “Most people stop with the first solution, which is complex,” he said. “But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.”

Such simplicity is the most difficult thing to achieve in design, says Porchez. “It’s a difficult decision to say you refuse some functionality for the user, but it’s for his own benefit.” Didur cites Apple as a yardstick: “I use Apple when talking to corporate clients as an example of the fact that considered design sells, and that it’s worth the investment in research and development.”

That’s evident in the affection elicited by Apple products. Heller balks when asked to name his favourite: “It’s like asking ‘Which one of your children do you like the best?’ ” It’s a mystique the company guards carefully, says Janoff, who’s often asked to speak about the logo, which has been modified slightly over the years. When he tried to track down the designers to credit them, he hit a wall, which doesn’t surprise him: “Part of the genius of someone like Steve is they have to think it’s totally their show.”

How that show will continue without Jobs is unknown. But there was no greater tribute to his design legacy than a link claiming to be leaked specs for the iPhone 5 that went viral months before his death. It depicted a fantastical, improbable holographic keyboard and laser special effects—and proved to be bogus. But the fact so many people thought it possible is testament to Jobs’s genius for bringing the world beautiful objects that reinvented technology and, more, inspired human wonder.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/the-computer-as-modern-art/feed/2The $30 tablet is here. But you can’t have one—yet.http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/the-30-tablet-is-here-but-you-cant-have-one-yet/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/the-30-tablet-is-here-but-you-cant-have-one-yet/#commentsTue, 11 Oct 2011 22:00:00 +0000Jesse Brownhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=219505What will the Internet look like when 6 billion people can connect to it?

The Aakash is a pretty crappy tablet computer. Made in India, the Android gadget’s touchscreen is small, with no multitouch functionality. Its battery only lasts for a few hours, its processor is fairly slow, it has no camera, and though it has WiFi, you’ll need a USB dongle to connect to the mobile Internet when away from wireless broadband. Compared to the iPad, the Aakash is a piece of junk—except for the one stat where it blows Apple completely out of the water: price.

The Aakash costs $37.98 to manufacture. Ten thousand units are currently in the hands of Indian students. Thanks to a government subsidy, they cost $30 each. A retail version of the Aakash is expected soon, with 90,000 units shipping to Indian stores bearing a sticker price of $50 to $60. There’s no word on a North American release just yet.

Here’s a short video report on the Aakash from NDTV:

This is a pretty big deal.

The early promise of the tablet computer—a “magical” device that would transform society (and maybe save the publishing industry) remains unrealized. By selling around 25 million iPads, Apple may have realized its shareholders’ dreams, but the greater dream—that the tablet computer would “change the world“—is still just a dream.

The Aakash could change that. Or rather, it could be the start of that change. By proving that a $50 tablet is possible, the device sets a new standard in affordable access. And affordability is the killer app, at least when it comes to global transformation.

Twenty-five million iPad owners sounds like a lot, until you consider that there are 5 billion active cell phone subscriptions in the world. Cell phones, unlike tablets, laptops, and smartphones, have become so cheap that they are owned by even the poorest people on the planet. But the technological limitation of these devices means that most subscribers are chatting and texting on a one-to-one basis. By contrast, there are around 2 billion people who can communicate through the Internet.

The Aakash, and the dozens of dirt-cheap Android tablets that will follow it, will do much to connect the remaining billions. Imagine the rate of online innovation when the Internet’s population triples? Imagine the impact on the written word when the market cap on tablet readers explodes from 25 million to a billion or more?

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/the-30-tablet-is-here-but-you-cant-have-one-yet/feed/17Imagine Rembrandt with an iPadhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/imagine-rembrandt-with-an-ipad/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/imagine-rembrandt-with-an-ipad/#commentsWed, 05 Oct 2011 14:30:01 +0000macleans.cahttp://www2.macleans.ca/2011/10/06/imagine-rembrandt-with-an-ipad/David Hockney never expected his digital drawings to end up as a major exhibition

According to David Hockney, if the 17th-century Dutch master Rembrandt were living today, he’d be using an iPad. Hockney should know. Not only is the British-born painter, printmaker and photographer recognized as a virtuoso himself, he’s an authority on Old Master techniques and the first major art-world figure to have a show featuring iPhone- and iPad-made pictures, Fresh Flowers, which opens Oct. 8 at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. “In Rembrandt’s drawings you can see that he worked very fast. That’s what the iPad permits,” explains Hockney from his studio in Bridlington, a seaside resort in Yorkshire. “Without ever having to get up for a pencil, you can draw from the first moment of inspiration.”

At 74, neither Hockney’s age nor his struggle with deafness has diminished his interest in innovation. He is as famous for his Fauvist landscapes and vibrant images of California swimming pools (in 1964 he fell in love with L.A., where he still has a residence) as his career-long embrace of new methods for making pictures.

In the seventies, Hockney arranged Polaroids as well as 35-mm prints to create photo-collages of a single subject. In 1989, he sent his exhibition art to the São Paulo Biennial via fax. As Charlie Scheips, curator of Fresh Flowers, explains, for decades Hockney’s work “has questioned the role of media and reproduction in art.”

Still, the last thing Hockney expected when he made his first drawing on an iPhone in 2008 was that it would end up in a museum exhibition. It was “a novelty,” he says. Hockney first used his phone to make pictures of flowers, then sunrises he saw from his bedroom window at Bridlington.

Soon Hockney began sending out his iPhone images to friends, among them Scheips, who pitched Fresh Flowers to the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, where it premiered last fall. Scheips and Hockney named the show after the artist’s love for sending out virtual bouquets.

Among the exhibition’s most notable features is that its art appears in the dark. To keep viewers’ experiences of Hockney’s work true to how it looked when created, all of the images in Fresh Flowers are presented on screens. Not a single picture is printed out or signed. Fresh Flowers also stands out because the exhibition has been a work in progress. Last spring, just months before the show’s Paris opening, the iPad was launched. Hockney immediately bought one. Using the Brushes application he taught himself to create digital drawings that were far more sophisticated than anything he could make on his phone. “We realized that we were going to have to introduce the iPad into the exhibition,” says Scheips.

Once the Paris show began, Hockney continued to make pictures for it, adding more than 20 new drawings while it was on. The Toronto run of Fresh Flowers will feature more recent and even more advanced works. Only when The New Yorker asked Hockney to create iPhone/iPad art for its covers, including its inaugural tablet issue last October, did he feel his output as an iArtist was “very, very good.” As he explains, “Skill is practice.” Today, Hockney uses the device so often (creating works in anywhere from a few minutes to three or four a day) that now his Savile Row-tailored suits are made with an extra-large breast pocket to hold it.

Hockney admits there are things that still need to be figured out. He hasn’t yet offered an iPhone- or iPad-made work for sale—something that’s caused ambivalence over his digital images in the international art press. “You can’t put a value on the work,” explains Scheips. “They are subversive because you might print them, or you might delete them. But no one can say what they’re worth.” As well, there have been cynics, who call iPad images “computer art,” a misnomer, according to Scheips. “People don’t call drawing ‘pencil art.’ And just because you do work with crayons doesn’t mean that Crayola owns your work.”

Hockney has a different comment. No more than a paintbrush could teach Rembrandt how to paint, the iPad, he says, “can’t teach you how to draw.”

Last June, Kevin Newman delivered the commencement address at the University of Western Ontario. Reading from his iPad, the veteran TV news journalist extolled social media’s increasing role in shaping global events—and how it’s destined to make the graduating class “the most consequential generation in more than a century.”

Afterwards, the 52-year-old, who received an honorary doctorate at the ceremony, took his seat on the dais and began typing into his iPhone. Once, in the paleolithic pre-Facebook era, a guest of honour displaying such distracted behaviour would have summoned dismayed cocked eyebrows. But if the university’s robed dignitaries were offended, they showed no sign. Nor did the graduates facing the stage, many of whom were quietly typing away on mobile devices themselves.

Newman, CTV’s newly appointed “digital news evangelist,” says he sees the tableau as the way of the world: “That’s how I live my life now. I capture moments and experiences,” he told Maclean’s. His behaviour was “within the boundaries of etiquette in a social-media age,” he says, admitting that these rules are being established on the run, often by the user himself (Newman only posted photos to his Twitter feed from backstage, didn’t text during the formal part of the ceremony, and says he wasn’t “too showy” about it).

Not everyone agrees. Pamela Eyring, director of the Protocol School of Washington, which teaches social manners to corporate and government clients, views public texting at an official event as “rude, period.” “It isn’t professional. It’s saying, ‘To hell with all of you,’ ” she says. “The guest of honour has a responsibility to be present in the moment.”

Not that she’s surprised. PDA preoccupation is so endemic that Eyring has identified the “four stages of BlackBerry abandonment”: confusion (“Why aren’t they listening?”), discomfort, irritation, and then, if texting continues, outrage (“You lean back, and you just stare”). She hides her own iPhone from sight in restaurants and at meetings to avoid being distracted by it.

“It’s an addiction,” she says, one that puts “personal and business relationships, both of which rely on making others feel valued, at risk.” (In a recent survey by dating site Zoosk, a third of singles said they’d left a date early because the other person was “constantly glancing” at their cell.) The consequences are dire, Eyring says: “We’re losing our one-on-one people skills and ability to engage in uninterrupted, focused conversations.”

Electronic gadgetry upends traditional rules of etiquette in paradoxical ways: it connects far-flung virtual communities and irritates the person standing next to you. And there are no accepted standards, as revealed in a 2009 City University of New York study of 57 people. In “Social networking obliterates etiquette: thumbs drum in rise of multi-tasking rudeness,” 68 per cent of those surveyed thought it was disrespectful to conduct a real-time conversation while texting someone else; 32 per cent didn’t. And 61 per cent said it was impolite to send a thank-you note via email; 18 per cent said it was fine, with the rest saying it depended on circumstances. Unsurprisingly, research reveals the younger you are, the more tolerant you’ll be about electronic distraction. A recent survey by consumer electronic site Retrevo found 10 per cent of people under age 25 didn’t see anything wrong with texting during sex.

Eyring expresses surprise that “cell-fishness,” as it has been dubbed, has gotten so much worse, given how high awareness is. In 2007, Kevin Spacey became a cultural hero when he yelled out, “Tell them we’re busy,” when a cellphone rang during a London performance of The Iceman Cometh. Yet in May, at a climactic plot point of Good People on Broadway, a cellphone rang and the owner actually answered it, forcing star Frances McDormand to tell her co-star, “Let’s wait.”

It’s not only the distracting glow of PDA screens in theatres, it’s loud cellphone conversations in elevators, narcissistic multi-taskers holding up lineups, diners Instagraming their entrees, dinner companions obsessively checking messages as if waiting to perform an organ transplant, and gallery-goers so intent on capturing a reproduction of a famous artwork they don’t even look at the original.

Cellphone-related rudeness is so bad it’s treated like a disease requiring awareness (July is National Cellphone Courtesy month in the U.S.) and policing (in July, an Ontario Provincial Police campaign targeted distracted drivers, charging more than 2,000 people, with one woman so preoccupied with her cell she didn’t even notice the sirens flagging her down).

It isn’t the first time hands have been wrung over new technology undermining civility. In America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, Claude S. Fischer writes that “hello” was once considered an “undignified” greeting and that etiquette primers railed against issuing invitations over the phone. AT&T even proposed a telephone pledge: “I believe in the Golden Rule and will try to be as Considerate and Courteous over the telephone as if Face to Face.”

But the ability to communicate with one person while face to face with someone else presents fresh social conundrums. Tweeting from a funeral, for instance, once would have been viewed as sacrilegious, yet the Twitter feed from Jack Layton’s state funeral was regarded as a connective bond. Technology itself can provoke perceived rudeness, be it by fostering self-importance, encouraging abrupt emails fired off with a quick click, or eliciting fury after realizing a BlackBerry IM hasn’t merited a response even though the message has been opened. Jessica Johnson, who works in creative direction at the Bay, is an iPhone user who blames that device’s celebrated cool design for inviting anti-social behaviour under the guise of self-expression. “It turned formerly nice, sensitive, creative types into assholes,” she says. “And now everybody has them.”

People are so preoccupied, they’re oblivious to how they’re coming across—a point famously illustrated on a 2009 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry David’s character becomes annoyed by a solo diner at the next table yelling into a headset. He retaliates by shouting across the table at an imaginary companion. The scene was played for laughs, but David’s irritation wasn’t irrational, according to 2010 research from Cornell University in Psychological Science that found listening to a cellphone conversation—a “half-alogue”—is far more intrusive than overhearing a two-way conversation. When forced to listen to a half-alogue, subjects’ ability to perform computer tasks was greatly reduced; two-way talk didn’t have the same effect.

“Our brain is hard-wired to pay attention to the unpredictable,” says Lauren Emberson, the Toronto-born psychologist who conducted the study. “When we don’t know what is being said on the other end of the conversation, it’s distracting because we’re trying to predict what the person is saying.”

Emberson, who’s researching whether drivers listening to one-sided conversations are equally distracted, has changed her cellphone habits: “I realized you’re impinging on people around you far more than with other types of speech.” She’s also newly sensitive to how readily people discuss intimate topics loudly in public on cellphones. “But when you’re discussing private topics in person, there’s a tendency to talk more quietly.”

Polls suggest a backlash is brewing: last year, a Zagat restaurant guide poll found 63 per cent frowned on texting, checking email or talking on the phone in a restaurant, though it’s not clear whether they’re referring to themselves, or others. A U.K. survey for tech giant Intel Corp. released in July was more blunt: most people said they’d rather see someone pick their nose than use a mobile device in front of them.

“People are fed up,” says Eyring, noting that “no cellphones” is the new “no smoking,” with drive-through pharmacies and fast-food outlets in the U.S. starting to refuse to serve digital multi-taskers. Even restaurants catering to the BlackBerry-bound business class are setting boundaries. Last month, Washington culinary mecca Rogue 24 made headlines when it asked diners to sign a contract prohibiting the use of phones and cameras during meals. New York City hot spot Momofuku Ko discourages cellphone use and prohibits photos. Celebrated New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer posts signs at his properties asking that patrons not use their cellphones “in consideration of our guests.” Still, that doesn’t stop people, says a hostess at Meyer’s Union Square Cafe, who reports they routinely ask people to take loud cell conversations outside.

Eyring says she has no qualms about asking guests to turn off their phones at a private dinner party, “but I’ll try to do it with humour.” Then there’s the “if you can’t beat ’em, control ’em with digital segregation” approach: in July, Vancouver’s Upintheair Theatre had a section of the balcony reserved for people to blog and tweet at its “Neanderthal Festival”— provided the volume was off and people didn’t talk. Co-artistic director Dave Mott says light from the mobile devices didn’t disturb those in the non-tweeting section. “We’re trying to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable for electronic devices in a live performance,” he says. If by pushing the boundaries he means ensuring ringers are off, it’s a start.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/public-display-of-disaffection/feed/6Don’t underestimate Apple’s contributionshttp://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/dont-underestimate-apples-contributions/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/dont-underestimate-apples-contributions/#commentsMon, 29 Aug 2011 15:07:11 +0000Peter Nowakhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=212028Peter Nowak on how it may be easy to hate Apple, but it's still misguided

I’m back from my short vacation and what’s the first thing I see? A character assassination attempt by my fellow blogger Jesse Brown.

Just kidding. I have nothing but respect for Jesse and love his stuff (his interview a few years back with Jim Prentice, where the industry minister hung up on him, is one of my all-time favourites). He messaged me while I was gone to ask if I was okay with him rebutting my blog post the other day about Steve Jobs and Apple’s importance to technology over the past decade. Of course I was, so he had at it.

To summarize, Jesse challenged my assertions that Apple changed everything with a slew of products that included the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad. He went on to say that Google has been the far more important technology company over the past 10 years.

Just as he thought I was “off my nut,” I think he’s similarly out to lunch, not so much for his conclusion but for how he got there.

First, a mea culpa of sorts. Jesse says I was wrong to say that Jobs himself has been the most important person of the decade, that “Osama Bin Laden must be spinning in his grave.”

No argument there. I’m a technology journalist and commentator and don’t necessarily consider myself qualified to discuss who the most important and influential person overall might be. I thought it was a given that I was limiting myself to the world of tech, but perhaps not. If so, my bad.

As far as which company has been more important, it’s not as straightforward an argument as Jesse suggests. While I’d probably also favour Google in that debate, it wouldn’t be without reservations. Jesse asserts that Apple’s biggest impact has been aesthetic—that all it has done is perfected the work of the previous century and only changed the way things look:

It’s essentially a hardware company, and it’s ill-prepared for a world where objects mean less and information means more. There’s no new God-gadget coming from Cupertino—all Apple can do once it’s done sticking cameras on things and offering them in different colors is to release cheaper iPhones and cheaper iPads, devaluing their gear until the gee-whiz factor is totally gone.

Google, meanwhile, is the company that has reinvented advertising, organized all the information on the internet in a meaningful way, driven cloud computing and created “a data-driven economy fueled by the input of individuals.

Again, I don’t disagree with the arguments for Google, but I do take umbrage with the serious undervaluing of Apple—and every other hardware maker, for that matter. Such a position completely discounts a full half of the Internet because without the things that actually connect to it, there is no Internet. It’s just an electronic ether that doesn’t really exist, much like heaven (as far as science can prove). Until we can connect our brains directly to this virtual miasma of data that Google has done such a good job organizing, we’re going to be reliant on hardware companies.

There are many hardware companies that are important to the Internet, from Cisco and other network equipment manufacturers to HP and other server makers. Apple and other consumer-facing companies, however, are the ones that decide how everyday people access and use that miraculous Internet.

Apple is just one of many makers of this sort of stuff, but its impact has been far more than aesthetic. It hasn’t just made things look nice, it has led the market and invented entire categories of products, all of which exploit, expand and bring value to the Internet. And before the Apple haters jump down my throat, there is a big difference between inventing a “product” and a “category.” Apple may not have invented the tablet computer, for example, but it sure did motivate the section for them at Best Buy. Apple didn’t invent smartphones either, but it absolutely kickstarted demand for them.

That said, isn’t a company that has expanded the ways and means in which people access all that information and data on the Internet just as valuable as the company that organized it and did nifty things with it? I think so.

Jesse also argues that much of what Apple has done was inevitable:

If the iPod and iTunes never existed, online music sales might have taken years longer to develop from the ashes of Napster. But it still would have happened… [With the iPhone Jobs] may have jumpstarted the popularization of the mobile Internet by a year or so.

Couldn’t the same be said of Google? There were search engines before it—all Sergey Brin and Larry Page did was come up with a particularly effective algorithm that eliminated human labour from the equation. While Yahoo had employees manually surfing the web and inputting search results, Google had computers doing the same, which gave it a huge efficiency advantage that ultimately crushed all competitors. Google Maps is similarly a fine tool, but isn’t it just a shinier version of Mapquest? Gmail is also great, but isn’t it just a better Hotmail?

Google’s real innovation was in figuring out how to apply ads to all of this stuff and make piles of money from them, which in turn enables everything else it does. In a way, all Google did was get to that now-logical conclusion before anyone else.

The point is that it doesn’t matter if it’s Apple or Google—it’s wrong to disparage a company just because it thought of a better way to do something that somebody else did before. That’s the essence of innovation.

Getting back to the iPhone, it’s hard to overstate just how big an impact it has had. Prior to its release, when corporate users were busy punching emails into their BlackBerrys, mobile data was unbelievably expensive. Here in Canada, a single gigabyte cost somewhere in the realm of $2,500. If Jobs’ biggest accomplishment over the past 10 years could be pinpointed, my vote would go to his having convinced AT&T to offer unlimited data on the iPhone for less than $100. From his perspective, there was no point in releasing a handy data- and web-enabled device if people weren’t going to use it because of its prohibitive cost. So he somehow forced AT&T to play ball. Carriers across North America had no choice but to follow suit, which is why we now have a smartphone and mobile Internet boom—one that Google is profiting from.

The smartphone originators—BlackBerry, Nokia and Microsoft—could have tried to do that. Same goes for Google. But they didn’t. It was Apple that dragged the Internet off computers and into the mobile light of day. That’s a huge accomplishment.

Jesse is also a self-avowed non-believer in the iPad and, by extension, tablets at large:

I’ve yet to notice any real impact of the gadget… Tablets are not the written word’s savior or the future of the digital age. They’re just a different kind of computer that adds comfort while subtracting control.

He’s missing the point of what a post-PC world is—it’s a future where computing is made invisible and divided into different devices in different situations (until we get that direct brain-internet connection, that is).

A few years ago, if you wanted to do any sort of computing work—write an article, look up movie showtimes, edit a video or watch a movie—you had to either sit down at your desktop or pull out your laptop. Now, smartphones are cutting into all of that, as are tablets.

I took this tablet hating to task a few months ago in a post where I professed my love for them. That love has only gotten stronger since. I write my stories and blog posts on a computer, but I do everything else—read books, watch movies while on the go, play games, hotel check-ins, social media, mapping, check the weather, you name it—on an iPad. A few weeks ago, I had coffee with an editor who told me about how her elderly parents had taken up computing thanks to the iPad. The former Luddites used it to book a trip out west, then emailed photos once they were there. My old Polish mother has also expressed an interest in tablets. That fact alone, if you knew her, is a major impact.

Businesses are adopting them too. A few months ago, when I was taking a shuttle from the L.A. airport, I couldn’t help but notice the buses all used iPads for route planning and organization. Similarly, The Guardian ran an article over the weekend about how airlines are using tablets for their flight plans. These are anecdotal examples, but more and more of them are popping up every day. Add them up and you have the makings of a real impact. Sales figures show PC sales are sliding because of tablets.

A post-PC world, therefore, isn’t one where computers are made obsolete—it’s one where the majority of computing is done on mobile devices.

The bottom line to all of this is that it’s easy to like Google and hate Apple, especially if you’re a journalist. One is relatively open and preaches the same while the other jealously guards its secrecy and is otherwise a closed book. Despite that, Apple still manages to get an undue amount of media attention, which rankles many.

By the same token, it’s easy to hate on the top dog—and let’s face it, that’s what Apple is in consumer tech (it has near-monopoly status with iPods, iTunes and iPads; has the top-selling smartphone by far despite Android’s collective market share leadership; and is on the verge of finally conquering Microsoft in computers). While the company amassed an army of fanboy followers, its history is as the underdog in the epic struggle against the “evil empire” (Microsoft). It’s perhaps understandable now that haters are now popping out of the woodwork—poetic justice and all that.

As a neutral observer with no stake in this issue either way, I can’t say I particularly care whether Google or Apple is the more influential and important company of the past decade. Both have been drivers of major change and will likely be vital to the continued evolution of the internet and technology in general, at least for the next few years. To dismiss or discount the accomplishments of either, however, is folly.

And the big tech news just keeps on a’rolling. I’m on a mini-vacation in Quebec, but I couldn’t not write something about Steve Jobs’s resignation, which was as surprising as Google taking over Motorola or HP announcing its exit from the consumer business, both of which happened last week. Jobs has been battling illness for some time so the news isn’t that unexpected, but just like the company he built, the man himself seemed somewhat unstoppable so it’s shocking nonetheless.

There will be a lot of commentary extolling what Jobs has meant to the world of technology and not much of it will be overstated. Simply put, no company—probably not even Google—and certainly no individual has made as much of a difference or changed the way things work over the past 10 years as Apple has under Jobs.

First, the iPod changed how we listen to music. In conjunction with iTunes, it also changed how we buy music, which did much to influence how video is sold and distributed as well. The iPhone then changed the world of telecommunications. Apple pried the phone itself and its data capabilities away from the greedy, clammy hands of wireless operators and really did make the whole business about “I” (or you and me). Most recently, Jobs pulled another rabbit out of his hat with the iPad, a device he called “magical” and which is now doing much to drive computing toward a post-PC reality.

It’s hard to think of another tech company—again, with the possible exception of Google—that has achieved anything close to that over the past decade. And, as far as we know, Apple is Jobs, so the company’s success is his success.

On the downside, Apple has been a singular pain to deal with as a journalist, and this too stems from Jobs’ controlling persona. Under no circumstances does the company or its people officially comment on anything, whether it’s products, trends or even the weather outside. Even when we are invited onto the company’s soil and given special briefings, this is as secretive and tight-lipped company as there is. Executives and product managers might tell us all kinds of great stuff in confidence, but we’re never allowed to use it on pain of never being invited back.

As frustrating as it often is, in a way I sort of respect the approach. Apple is very clearly a company that just does, as opposed to one that talks about doing. I know I have a few friends who talk a big game about things they’re going to do with their lives, but they never end up following through. That’s annoying, so it’s refreshing to see someone—even if it’s a company I’d like to occasionally talk to—do the reverse. There are a lot of tech companies that talk a lot, but ultimately accomplish nothing.

The big question now is: Can Apple continue its dominance without Jobs in an every-day role? I’m sure the other question every journalist is quietly asking themselves is will a post-Jobs Apple continue being a company that just does, or will it open up a bit and start talking too?

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/steve-jobs-put-doing-ahead-of-talking/feed/3I’ve seen the future, and it’s Android over iPadhttp://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/ive-seen-the-future-and-its-android-over-ipad/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/ive-seen-the-future-and-its-android-over-ipad/#commentsFri, 29 Jul 2011 19:22:53 +0000Jesse Brownhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=207069The tablet is a great invention, but it will ultimately be rendered generic

As a rule I don’t make technology predictions, for a couple of reasons:

First, my job is to talk about what’s going on in the world right now, not to foretell the future. It’s weird how often tech journalists are looked to for their soothsaying powers (it’s also weird how often they’ll play along). We don’t ask, say, business reporters for their stock picks, but somehow anyone who reviews a gadget is deemed capable of prophesying the fate of massive companies and their products.

Second, guessing at the future of technology is a mug’s game. You will almost certainly be wrong, and therefore you are almost certainly making an ass out of future you. I like future me. I like his hovercraft pants and his metallic beard, and I refuse to embarrass him from this meager past.

That said, I will now break my rule and make a technology prediction. Even worse, I will make a tech prediction that was made by someone else, two days ago.

There will eventually be more Android tablets in use than iPads.

This of course was stated as fact, not prophecy, by a research firm called Informa. Informa should change their name to Obviousa, because theirs is the safest prediction I’ve heard in a while.

The phenomenal growth of Android smartphones illustrates the new normal when it comes to mobile devices: there’s Apple and there’s everything else, and everything else will run Android. Hardware companies have finally got the message that they are hardware companies—consumers don’t want their crappy, proprietary, incompatible software. Android is free, open and good, and as more and more of the unApple world adopts it, it will soon boast more apps than Apple.

But I bet you’d still take an iPad. Fair enough, but consider this: iPads remain expensive toys for grownups in countries like Canada. Teens and kids here would sooner spend that cash on an Xbox, and folks from poorer nations just want stuff that works. Any Android slab—even a lousy one—works. As long as it’s a glowing touchable rectangle running Android, you’ve got the basic functionality of an iPad. Reviewers like to pick at the details—maybe it’s a bit heavier, not as bright, less responsive, whatever. To 91% of the world’s population it’s 91% of the way there, and if it sells for 19% of the price, then that will be the determining factor.

In a sense, Apple has screwed itself by making the iPad so elegant and simple. How can they continue to differentiate it? Change the colour, make it thinner, slap a camera on each side—and then what? Additions will only subtract.

The tablet is a great invention, but it will ultimately be rendered generic. The race is now on price, and Android will win it.

When, in the lead-up to the last federal election, the Conservative party wanted to portray Stephen Harper as dedicated and hard-working, the resulting television ad showed a solitary Prime Minister at his desk, going through stacks of presumably important files. Nowhere to be seen were the familiar trappings of the modern office: no BlackBerry, no computer, just a man and his pen.

According to the Prime Minister’s Office, Harper does use a laptop and an iPad—to research his hockey book, check on the status of bills through Parliament’s website, and work on speeches. But Harper has, in fact, never owned a BlackBerry. And he stopped using a cellphone and email after becoming Prime Minister in 2006. “I’ve actually taken the view as Prime Minister that if I start using these things, then I’ll be doing them myself instead of my staff,” he told the Toronto Star a couple of years ago. “So I make sure the staff knows how to work all the BlackBerries and all those things, and I try and keep focused on the big picture.” The Prime Minister also acknowledged security concerns.

U.S. President Barack Obama famously fought to keep his BlackBerry when he took office. He was ultimately allowed to keep the cherished device, but with added security measures, including a select list of friends and advisers with whom he is allowed to communicate. Obama has since said the gadget had lost some of its appeal under his new circumstances. “I’ve got to admit, it’s no fun because they think that it’s probably going to be subject to the Presidential Records Act, so nobody wants to send me the real juicy stuff,” he told The View last year.

Despite his not carrying a BlackBerry, Harper’s office assures his family can reach him in a number of different ways.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/why-harper-is-never-in-cellphone-range-2/feed/0America with no Apple?http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/america-with-no-apple/
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/america-with-no-apple/#commentsMon, 11 Jul 2011 13:10:06 +0000macleans.cahttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=200688Samsung and Apple are trying to get each others' products banned from the U.S.

Samsung upped the stakes in its patent dispute with Apple last week when it called on the U.S. International Trade Commission to ban imports of Apple’s iPhone and iPad from China, where they are made. Apple is expected to respond with a similar request, raising the possibility that the tech giants will be choked off from the American market. The two sides have traded accusations of copyright infringement since April, when Apple accused its South Korean rival of ripping off its smartphone and tablet designs. For its part, Samsung has filed similar lawsuits against Apple in Germany and Japan.

While Apple has dominated the tablet market, Samsung has emerged as a big player, too, and is expected to pass Nokia as the world’s top producer of smartphones this year. Ironically, the two companies have enjoyed a close business relationship. Apple is one of Samsung’s biggest buyers of computer chips and screens.

Universities in Canada are rushing to get their apps onto your phones and tablets. When done right, those apps can help potential students see into the soul of a campus. Even better, they can help current students find their way to lunch, to class and to enriching events. But when done poorly, apps can make a school look out totally of touch with technology. The lesson? Don’t rush your app schools. Here’s what we think of six Canadian universities’ apps for iPhone.

University of British Columbia — Grade: A

If every school made an app this good, then there would be no more paper brochures arriving in the mailbox, no one will ever get lost on campus, and no student would ever have an excuse to say that they’re bored.

Click on “Future Students” and then on “Videos.” Unlike most promos, these videos have compelling stories. Watch the Faculty of Arts video that follows a team of students on their journey across Mongolia on motorcycles. It’s an example of the type of interdisciplinary project that UBC professors encourage.

But that’s just the beginning. There are also useful features for current students. For example, the events calendar shows students what’s happening on campus that day. They can decide between an art show on Japanese-inspired Inuit art, an intro lecture on Life Cycle Analysis and a documentary movie at the Student Union Building — all with prices, times, and directions right there on one page.

University of Saskatchewan — Grade: B

Saskatchewan understood the assignment well. They also get points for having been the first brave school in Canada to go mobile. Even though it’s aging, the app still does all the things students would normally do on a university website, but now they can do it from the bus, the cafeteria or the line at the student aid office.

On the front page, there’s access to e-mail, final exams info, The Sheaf student newspaper, a grade tracker and a class schedule. All of it is easy to use. The only things missing are transit information and good photos of campus. Those Webcam shots are dated. (They’re soooo 2005.)

University of Western Ontario — Grade: C

UWO has always had a cumbersome website and their app suffers from the same affliction. The front page includes icons entitled Giving Back, Faculties and Sessional Dates. (What exactly is a “sessional date”? Anyone?) It’s unfortunate, considering that there is good information here. It’s just buried under those nonsensical titles. For example, click on “Faculties” and then “Ivey School of Business.” You’ll find Quick Facts about the school and the programs they offer. It’s a virtual viewbook — they just didn’t tell you that.

University of Alberta — Grade: C

There are some features here that are useful for a user on the go, such as a map with icons attached to buildings and a description of what’s inside. “Pizza, anyone? My phone says there’s some in that building over there!”

Elsewhere, the app fails at useability. For example, the calendar requires so much scrolling through listings like “students in Phase II of BSc in medicine must…. blah, blah, blah,” that it’s not remotely useful. Similarly, the transit tool was a good idea, but it was poorly executed. It looks like nothing more than a long list of light-rail stations and the times that trains have already left.

York University — Grade: D

This app looks slick, but the content is boring. Sorry York, but few students are going to click on headlines like “York in the news” or “Guidance Counsellors Assemble!” On top of that, the photo gallery screams “someone in the meeting thought this was a good idea.” It wasn’t. A more useful application of those photos would be a tour around campus. Let’s hope that version 2.0 is better.

McMaster University — Grade: F

The screen at the beginning says “loading” for so long that suspense builds and builds. But it’s not worth the wait. Inside, users are asked to choose between “Thinking about MAC” or “Current Students.” Clicking on “Thinking about MAC” presents two confusing options: “Residence” or “Faculty of Science.” Clicking either prompts an error message. Clicking on ”Current Students” at the opening page doesn’t lead to anywhere better. I choose “Second Year,” then “Faculty of Science,” then “Kinesiology.” Those multiple clicks are rewarded by nothing more than a reminder that my OSAP application was due in January. Let’s hope that version 2.0 is built from the ground up. There’s no saving this one.

The official launch of Research In Motion’s PlayBook device in New York City, on April 15, didn’t muster the same international media blitz that accompanied the debut of Apple’s iPad a year ago. But the two events shared one thing in common—both sparked a fierce backlash over what the tablet makers failed to include.

As it stands, the PlayBook doesn’t come with email, contacts or calendar programs. Those applications can be accessed by wirelessly bridging the PlayBook to a BlackBerry smartphone, thus extending RIM’s airtight security features. But those without a BlackBerry must use online services, or wait for a promised update later this year. There were also complaints that PlayBook users have access to just 3,000 tailored apps, versus 65,000 for the iPad. The Wall Street Journal tech reviewer Walt Mossberg called the PlayBook “a tablet with a case of codependency,” and said he couldn’t recommend the device to anyone but “folks whose BlackBerrys never leave their sides.”

It didn’t help that just days before the launch, RIM’s co-CEO Mike Lazaridis walked out of an interview with the BBC because he was angry over the reporter’s questions. A Google News search for “Lazaridis and BBC” turned up nearly half as many hits as “Playbook and launch” for the past week.

RIM has a lot riding on the PlayBook. Investors and analysts worry about the company’s ability to keep pace with Apple and Google, which supplies its Android operating system to other tablet makers. Nevertheless, Jeff Kvaal, a technology analyst with Barclays Capital, is optimistic RIM will sell at least three million PlayBooks in the first fiscal year. And remember, when the first iPad launched, it had plenty of doubters. For one thing, it didn’t have a camera, and some claimed the iPad was doomed. Instead, Apple has already sold 15 million units. The PlayBook may never come close to matching the iPad in sales. But it’s probably also too soon to close the book on it either.

Okay, so Apple has been tracking your whereabouts through your iPhone or iPad without your consent for the past 10 months. So what?

No, really – so what? You don’t need to worry about Apple knowing where you’ve been. As they’ve explained (.pdf), they’re tracking you for your own good! By triangulating your whereabouts through cell phone towers, Apple can vastly narrow down the range of your possible GPS coordinates, making your GPS-reliant apps run much quicker. Feel better yet?

Maybe not. Okay, but consider this- even though your device secretly rats out your location to Apple every 12 hours, this data cannot be linked to you. Apple assigns you a randomly generated number that changes every 24 hours. It’s this number that’s linked to your location history, not your name. So even if law enforcement presented Apple with warrants, demanding the complete history of your whereabouts (as they routinely and successfully do with mobile carriers), Apple would be technically unable to drop a dime on you, even if they wanted to.

This guy stops at every Arby's.

So don’t worry about the fact that Apple has your location data. Instead, worry about the fact that you do.

Your iPhone or iPad automatically generates an unencrypted file called “consolidated.db” which contains the last 10 months of your location data with time stamps. Any computer synched to your Apple device also has this file. Anyone who gets their hands on your gear can easily tap into the file and get an exact log of your movements. There’s already a handy app to turn this raw data into a pretty map.

U.S. Senator Al Franken has sent Apple a stern letter (.pdf) demanding answers on this flabbergasting revelation, and you can expect every privacy commissioner in the land to soon do the same. In the meantime, here’s how the nervous among you can delete your consolidated.db files – so long as your iPhone is jailbroken.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/im-good-enough-im-smart-enough-and-doggone-it-apple-tracks-me/feed/13Wishful thinking?http://www.macleans.ca/economy/economicanalysis/wishful-thinking/
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/economicanalysis/wishful-thinking/#commentsThu, 31 Mar 2011 17:34:02 +0000Chris Sorensenhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=180515Dell’s global head of marketing, Andy Lark, has become the subject of Internet ridicule after he trash talked the iPad— the very same device people are lining up around the…

Dell’s global head of marketing, Andy Lark, has become the subject of Internet ridicule after he trash talked the iPad— the very same device people are lining up around the block to buy. In a recent interview, Lark suggested Apple’s approach would ultimately fail when it comes to business customers because the iPad runs on a closed OS and is too expensive. “Apple is great if you’ve got a lot of money and live on an island. It’s not so great if you have to exist in a diverse, open, connected enterprise; simple things become quite complex,” Lark said. He went on to suggest the iPad’s price tag puts it out of reach for most people, particularly once you throw on a bunch of accessories like a peripheral keyboard, mouse and a fancy case. “An iPad with a keyboard, a mouse and a case [means] you’ll be at $1500 or $1600; that’s double of what you’re paying,” he said. “That’s not feasible.” (Not to be outdone, an HP executive also recently criticized Apple’s heavy-handed relationship with partner companies, calling it potential weakness).

Blogs were quick to provide Lark with a reality check. “Okay, timeout,” said BGR. “[US]$1,600 for an iPad, case, keyboard, and mouse? Let’s do some quick math: 64GB 3G iPad 2 $829, ridiculously expensive leather Smart Cover $69, Apple Bluetooth Keyboard $69, Apple iPad Dock $69 (not mentioned, but why not), Apple Mighty Mouse (which won’t work with an iPad, but we’re going with it) $69. That’s a grand total of $1,105, just $400 to $500 off Lark’s estimates.” Apple Insider drew a similar conclusion: “It is unlikely that a keyboard, mouse and case would cost the same as an iPad.”

Lark may have a point about potential demand for cheaper tablets, but Dell would be wise to focus on improving its own products (anybody have a Dell Streak?) instead of criticizing Apple’s. Apple has sold nearly 16 million iPads worldwide and currently commands three-quarters of the market. And some analysts are dramatically upping their forecasts following the success of the recent iPad 2 launch. A quick look at stock price performances over the past year tells the story: Apple’s shares are up nearly 50 per cent. Dell and HP? Down 3 per cent and 22 per cent respectively. Clearly Apple is doing something right.

When a 6.3-magnitude earthquake rocked New Zealand last week, killing dozens and toppling the steeple of Christchurch Cathedral, it took a Canadian, Christchurch Bishop Victoria Matthews, to give nature its due. “People shouldn’t think they’re in control of Mother Nature,” she said. The long-time Anglican bishop of Edmonton arrived in her antipodean idyll three years ago. Her words echo poet Alden Nowlan, who described Canada as “a country where a man can die simply from being caught outside.” Matthews, who is working to get churches open and parishioners dug out, acknowledged her ignorance of some of nature’s talents. “I knew about snowstorms, I knew about hurricanes,” she said. “My Canadian education was woefully lacking about earthquakes.”

Kimberly French/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

She learned from the best

Michèle Alliot-Marie, the French foreign minister, is the latest casualty of Tunisia’s fallen regime. Her reaction to the protests that led to the Jasmine revolution surprised many—she offered French savoir faire to stamp out dissenters. Later, it was revealed she was on holiday in Tunisia as the revolt heated up, and her family has close connections with ousted Tunisian president Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali. She resigned over the issue, and President Nicolas Sarkozy swiftly replaced her with Alain Juppé, his trusted defence minister. Like the Arab autocrats, Alliot-Marie did not go quietly. In her resignation letter, she insisted she’d done nothing wrong, adding: “I have been the victim of political, then media, attacks.”

Michel Euler/AP

Hard out there to be a thief

Taking time from his 150-year jail term for defrauding investors of tens of billions of dollars, Bernie Madoff gave another interview this month, this time to New York magazine. He talked of his silent suffering in carrying his secret for years. He mused, as he did to the New York Times, that banks and investors who were getting rich surely knew something fishy was going on—or should have. “Am I a sociopath?” he asked his therapist, in one vulnerable moment. (She said no—he feels remorse.) For some that may be offset by his petulance that all the good he did is forgotten and he’s judged too harshly by public and media. “I am a good person,” he insists.

No fairy-tale ending here

Both buzz and fury are brewing on the eve of the release of the new film by Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke. Hardwicke’s new project is in territory not far from her last. Her Red Riding Hood is a supernatural tale that plays up the latent sexuality of the Brothers Grimm original (a wolf, dressed in ladies’ clothing, luring a girl into bed?). The buzz is understandable: it stars the luminous Amanda Seyfried. The fury is over the tie-in book, by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright. You can buy it now—but fans discovered when they got to the last page it won’t reveal the ending. Instead there’s a link to a website that will go up once the film is out. The griping has already begun in the blogosphere. Suffice it to say this is one plot twist that won’t stay a surprise too long.

Look—a fluffy dog!
Want to get Queen Elizabeth II‘s mind off potash—a neat trick if you’re the premier of Saskatchewan and have just helped block an international deal to take over Saskatoon-based PotashCorp? Meeting the Queen during a visit to London designed to assuage ruffled feathers, Brad Wall, the premier in question and a former disc jockey from Swift Current, Sask., presented the Queen with children’s books written by Regina-born folksinger Connie Kaldor—books with titles like A Duck in New York City and A Poodle in Paris. The books are destined for Savannah Phillips, who became the Queen’s first great-grandchild when she was born last year.

FIONA HANSON/PA

Some fashion advice: zip it

Less than a week before John Galliano, head designer for Christian Dior, was to present his latest collection in Paris, he’s been axed by the fashion house. The firing was prompted by a video showing the fashion bad boy drunkenly taunting patrons in a Paris bar with anti-Semitic slurs such as “people like you would be dead,” and “your mothers, your forefathers gassed.” He added, “I love Hitler.” Dior’s head, Sidney Toledan, condemned the remarks, as did actress Natalie Portman, who has signed an endorsement deal with Dior. “As an individual who is proud to be Jewish,” she said, “I will not be associated with Mr. Galliano in any way.”

Call him a fan

American Filmmaker Michael Moore‘s romance with Canada has been long and multi-faceted: 10 years ago he loved those trusting unlocked doors he found in Toronto filming Bowling for Colombine; in Sicko, he heaped praise on our universal health care. Last week, he picked a new darling: the people of Thompson, Man., who he says are “fighting a front-line battle” in the “war of the world’s rich on the middle class.” In a blog post, he skewers Brazilian mining giant Vale, which plans to shutter operations in Thompson and put 500 people out of work, even though it recently got a $1-billion loan from the Canadian government. “Don’t be embarrassed if you need a map to find Thompson,” writes Moore, who complains U.S. media “only tell you about Canadians if they have some connection to Justin Bieber.” Yet many Canadians will be just as clueless about remote Thompson’s location, as jazzed about Bieber, and as indifferent to Thompson’s workers.

A.M.P.A.S./ABC/Getty Images

Another one for Gwyneth (yawn)
Poet/author/actor/soap star James Franco wasn’t the only overachiever in the room Oscar night. Halle Berry was readying for her Broadway debut, and there was GOOP publisher/style maven Gwyneth Paltrow in her third recent musical turn, belting out Coming Home. Actors. We know there’s nothing they can’t do, but must they actually go out and do it all?

Castro goes, long live Castro

Another global political heavyweight may be on the way out. Fidel Castro is expected to resign as Communist party leader in April. Cuba’s “El Jefe” will likely hand over the job to his brother Raul, who became president in 2008, due to Fidel’s declining health—which means that, for the first time, a non-Castro will take the party’s secondary slot.

Fat is not a contortionist issue

Brian J. Gavriloff/Edmonton Journal

His weight fluctuates between 400 and 450 lb., yet he can do the splits and touch the soles of his feet to his cherubic cheeks. Edmonton’s Matt Alaeddine, 30, bills himself as the “world’s fattest contortionist” and has travelled the globe with the freakish Jim Rose Circus, having got his start at the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival. “Obesity! It’s working for me,” he recently told the Edmonton Journal, for a story that generated worldwide curiosity, likely due to an accompanying video of the performer staging impromptu feats of fleshy derring-do dressed in a gold nylon two-piece apparently bought at American Apparel. “I know you’re in shock; you can still clap!” he told a crowd of clearly uneasy Edmontonians at a local transit station.

A big bite out of Apple

Apple’s superstar designer, Jonathan Ive, may be leaving the company, which is suffering a period of uncertainty in the wake of Steve Jobs‘ medical leave. Ive, Apple’s highest-profile employee after Jobs, heads the design team responsible for its most famous products, including the iPad, iPhone and Macbook. The 41-year-old is “at loggerheads” with the California-based company over plans to return to his native Britain, where he hopes to educate his twin sons, according to Britain’s Sunday Times. His imprint and value to Apple—and its stock price—is immeasurable.

Special delivery

Call it documentary activism. Louie Psihoyos, the American director of the Oscar-winning movie The Cove—about the annual dolphin hunt in Taiji, Japan—was so keen the people of Taiji see his film he sent Japanese-language DVDs to every household in the fishing village. “To me the film is a love letter to the people of Taiji,” he said. “They’ll realize that it is just a handful of local environmental thugs giving a whole nation a black eye.” The love may not be returned. The town office said it had received copies of the film, but no one had watched it yet.

Good lad

Apparently Equatorial Guinea’s dictator, Brig. Gen. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, hasn’t learned from the uprisings roiling North Africa. Word has leaked that Teodorin Obiang, the son he is grooming for succession, has commissioned a super-yacht worth $380 million—three times what the oil-rich African country spends on health and education each year. Teodorin, who lives in a $35-million Malibu mansion, reportedly fills his days with naps and Rodeo Drive shopping sprees with his Playboy bunny girlfriend. The next Guinean leader is described in Foreign Policy as an “unstable, reckless idiot” by a former U.S. intelligence official who knows him well.

Samir Hussein/GETTY IMAGES

A little bit of country

Kate Middleton was keen on a village wedding. So while her nuptials will take place at Westminster Abbey, she and Prince William are bringing a bit of village to the city. A butcher, a pub landlord, a postman and convenience-store owners from Bucklebury, her hometown in Berkshire, were among the 2,000-odd guests to receive a gold-embossed invitation. Chan Shingadia and her husband, Hash, who run the store, will rub shoulders with the likes of David Beckham. Mrs. Shingadia said she’s accepted, and told the Telegraph Kate “is really caring, and she is always a good customer.” The pair pop by so regularly, she’s always stocked with the very common treats they favour: Haribo sweets and mint Vienetta ice cream.

It has done none of these things. After the cool factor wore off, iPad owners were left with a nice way to surf the web on a couch. Compare it to the iPhone, a truly transformational device that owners interact with hundreds of times a day. My dad (not exactly a luddite, but close) got one as a gift, and within a week he couldn’t remember how he had lived without it. He now has a dorky little holster for it on his belt. It’s adorable. My mom followed up by buying him an iPad. He played with it for a day or two and hasn’t used it since. The iPhone is a crucial tool, the iPad a toy. Boys get bored with their toys.

Now we’re supposed to get excited all over again because the toy comes in white. Yes, it’s also a bit thinner and a bit faster. Guess what? Computers will always get smaller and faster. The problem with the original iPad wasn’t that it was too slow or too big. It’s that it was a solution in search of a problem. It didn’t let me do anything I couldn’t do before.

Perhaps this will change. As more and more people acquire iPads and other tablets (especially those that run on open platforms), new uses for them will emerge. New apps will be developed, and eventually someone will come up with something awesome that we will want to do all the time and that can only be done with a tablet. But when that happens, it will be despite Steve Jobs, not because of him.

Apple has steadily devolved from a maker of beautiful machines for creators to a censorious manufacturer of shiny doodads you can’t easily type on or share files with. Whereas once they led by innovating, they now aim to stay on top by using their market clout to bully others from doing so—see yesterday’s post by Chris Sorensen on Apple’s attempt to monopolize the touchscreen market.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/the-ipad-sucks/feed/339iPad not ready for the classroomhttp://www.macleans.ca/education/university/ipad-not-ready-for-the-classroom/
http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/ipad-not-ready-for-the-classroom/#commentsTue, 25 Jan 2011 16:08:38 +0000Danielle Webbhttp://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/?p=22249Students still need great teachers, not just great tech

Forty students at the University of Notre Dame were randomly pulled from class and told they had been selected as participants in a pilot project, if they were willing, on the effectiveness of iPads and e-books in education. To no one’s surprise, they all volunteered for the project.

The students reported at the end of a year that they had more fun in their classes and felt that they had learned more than they might have without the iPad and e-books at their disposal.

What’s interesting though is the students also reported that they found the highlighting tool to be clumsy, bemoaned the poor implementation of a note-taking tool and a full 20 per cent of them said, “The iPad lacks important functions/tools that are available with a traditional textbook or other device.”

Despite that, though, many said they were “willing to wait for improvements.”

I’ve already written about the costs of these devices when compared to existing education models involving notebooks, pens and laptops. Even the researchers in this study argue that the cost of participation — buying the iPad in addition to e-books — is “prohibitive for students.”

But what should be noticed is the fact that a full 20 per cent of students found that the technology wasn’t ready for educational use yet. They found that the iPad lacked the tools old technology offered so easily — highlighting and taking notes. Scribbling in the margins was impossible for them.

A 2008 study looking at how quickly video and other multi-media technology was being incorporated into mobile devices found that a lot of the early adoption was all about the novelty of the idea and not about its functionality. But as the availability of video on demand became normalized, consumers began looking for a reason to consume. They wanted it to be useful, personal and meaningful. When it failed in that regard, they tuned out.

“The videos were used to fill up empty slots when waiting for something: Queuing at the cashier while shopping or while having a break from homework. The users talked about the novelty wearing off: A few news broadcasts and cartoons were not experiences as inspiring enough as content in the long run,” the study reads.

And that is what the iPad risks becoming for educational institutions if it doesn’t begin offering real, student-centred education products. The classes students remember most, the ones they value most, are not those with the most interesting subject matter, they’re the ones with the best teachers who are most capable of making any subject matter interesting.

The iPad and other tablet devices are not substitutions for textbooks. They are new tools that good teachers can use to further interact with their students. Until educational institutions recognize this, tablets risk becoming just another novelty product.

EMMA STONE
Maybe it’s the red hair, but actress Emma Stone, who got rave reviews for her performance in this year’s edgy teen comedy Easy A, has been called the new Lindsay Lohan—minus the antics. Stone, who also appeared in Zombieland and Superbad, recently landed the female lead in an upcoming Spider-Man prequel: she’ll play Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker’s love interest. Unlike her best-known characters, all redheads, Stacy’s a blond—coincidentally, Stone’s natural shade (turns out that her famously red hair is a dye job).

THE DOUBLE DOWN
Amid both celebration and horror, KFC launched its Double Down—bacon, melted cheese and Colonel’s Sauce, sandwiched between pieces of chicken—across the U.S. and Canada. Named after a blackjack move, this bunless wonder represents something of a gamble for even the most devoted fast-food fan. Even so, the phrase “heart attack on a bun” suddenly seemed outdated thanks to the Double Down’s limited, four-week Canadian run.

ANGELA JAMES
She’s been called the Wayne Gretzky of women’s hockey and, in November, Angela James scored another goal: she and American Cammi Granato become the first women to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. James, who grew up playing street hockey in Toronto’s crime-riddled Flemingdon Park neighbourhood, went on to become the sport’s first female superstar. “Woman or man, being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame is a great honour,” James said. “Being one of the first females, I’m ecstatic. It’s a start for the rest of the women to continue on.”

MODERN FAMILY
Since it first aired last year, Modern Family has rocketed to No. 1 in the ratings, the first non-traditional comedy in years to beat out conventional sitcoms for the top spot. A half-hour show that follows a multi-generational Los Angeles clan, it wrested the best comedy award from 30 Rock at the Emmys in August, claiming five other Emmys as well—more than any show—along the way. Actress Sofia Vergara had promised to streak naked down Sunset Boulevard if her show won, telling reporters, “I’m not afraid of anything. I’m Colombian.” She later claimed to have done it—even though, apparently, nobody saw. “I run fast,” she said.

DAVID JOHNSTON
Known for his sense of humour, Canada’s new Governor General got some laughs when he entered the Senate chamber on Oct. 1, the day he was sworn into the role, and acted surprised to be there. Not to be outdone, his wife, Sharon, sparked applause when she fixed his jacket, bowed and kissed him. A career academic and the former president of the University of Waterloo, Johnston is Canada’s 28th Governor General. “We want to be the smart and caring nation,” he said, before riding in a carriage to his new residence at Rideau Hall, nine grandchildren at his side.

JADEN AND WILLOW SMITH
With two superstar parents—Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith—the kids are not camera shy. Now they’re stars in their own right. Jaden, 12, was a hit this summer in the title role of The Karate Kid remake, showing off his moves opposite martial arts master Jackie Chan. And earlier this year, before Willow had even turned 10, Jay-Z signed the tiny diva to his label as her first hip-hop single, Whip My Hair, climbed the charts. The rap impresario has compared Willow to a young Michael Jackson, while her edgy fashion sense and lopsided haircut have people calling her the next Rihanna, too. They grow up so fast.

TEA-PARTY-BACKED SENATORS
In a sign of the growing influence of the populist Tea Party movement in the U.S., activists helped push some of their favourite candidates (like Mike Lee in Utah, Rand Paul in Kentucky and Marco Rubio in Florida) into the Senate in November’s mid-term elections. Within days of defeating Democrat Jack Conway, Paul mused about bringing a bicameral Tea Party caucus to Capitol Hill. “You know, I’ve never held office before, so I go there expecting to change the world and I won’t be told otherwise,” he said.

SAINT ANDRÉ
In October, believers packed St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal as Brother André, who founded the oratory over 100 years ago, was recognized as a saint. Born to a poor, working-class family in the Quebec town of St-Grégoire-d’Iberville in 1845, and orphaned by age 12, Alfred Bessette worked in textile mills before joining the Congregation of Holy Cross, where he took the name Brother André. He’s believed to have performed thousands of healings, including two that the Vatican accepted as miracles. Saint André “showed boundless charity and did everything possible to soothe the despair of those who confided in him,” Pope Benedict XVI said.

THE iPAD
When Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad in January at a company event in San Francisco, somebody in the audience wolf whistled. Nicknamed the Jesus tablet, Apple’s iPad (a portable touch-screen computer that can play videos, surf the Net, and serve as an e-reader, to name just a few of its functions) hit store shelves in April, selling over 300,000 units in its first day. Its success sent traditional media stalwarts (the Washington Post, the New Yorker) scrambling to become iPad-compatible. This sleek tablet turned out to be so good, it made everyone forget how ridiculous the name “iPad” once seemed.

ROB FORD AND NAHEED NENSHI
This fall, two big cities welcomed two colourful new mayors: Rob Ford and Naheed Nenshi. In Toronto, long seen as a lefty stronghold, voters elected the blunt Ford—who frequently promised to “stop the gravy train”—despite his notoriously big mouth, revelations of a decade-old pot charge, and his critics’ efforts to put anybody but him in the mayor’s seat. And in Calgary, often thought our most conservative major city, Nenshi rode a wave of grassroots support to become Canada’s first Muslim mayor. “Today, Calgary is a different place than it was yesterday,” Nenshi said after his victory, a sentiment many Torontonians, happily or not, could identify with, too.

JULIAN ASSANGE
It’s long been debated how to report on war (last year, the Pentagon relaxed a ban on media coverage of the flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers returning home). Computer hacker Julian Assange is forcing the issue through the website he founded, WikiLeaks. In October, it released almost 400,000 reports on the war in Iraq, which it called the largest classified military leak in history. In July, it did the same with 76,000 U.S. military logs from Afghanistan. Assange says he’s working for transparency; U.S. officials say he’s putting lives at risk.

KIM JONG UN
From his bouffant hairdos to a fondness for sunglasses, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is known for his unusual fashion sense. In this, and in other ways, his will be big platform shoes to fill—but apparently, the 68-year-old has named a successor. In November, state media listed his son, Kim Jong Un, directly after his father in reports on a funeral committee for a military official, a strong sign of the line of succession from one of the world’s most secretive and militaristic states. Not much is known about Jong Un (not even his age; he’s believed to be 27), although he was recently appointed to senior military and political posts. Whether he’ll share his father’s taste in attire is unclear, but observers say Jong Un bears an eerie resemblance to his grandfather, the founding president.

The iPad

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad in January at a company event in San Francisco, somebody in the audience wolf whistled. Nicknamed the Jesus tablet, Apple’s iPad (a portable touch-screen computer that can play videos, surf the Net, and serve as an e-reader, to name just a few of its functions) hit store shelves in April, selling over 300,000 units in its first day. Its success sent traditional media stalwarts (the Washington Post, the New Yorker) scrambling to become iPad-compatible. This sleek tablet turned out to be so good, it made everyone forget how ridiculous the name “iPad” once seemed.

BP

Former CEO Tony Hayward—the man tasked with explaining the world’s largest-ever oil spill—climbed to the top of oil giant BP as a reformer who stated, after a 2005 refinery explosion, that his company’s leadership “doesn’t listen sufficiently well.” But after the Deepwater Horizon spill, Hayward, 53, didn’t seem to have absorbed his own lessons. He told reporters he “wanted his life back,” refused to answer queries from congressmen, and attended a yacht race while one of the worst environmental catastrophes on record slowly unfolded.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/the-ipad-vs-bp/feed/0Pulling out the Playbookhttp://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/pulling-out-the-playbook/
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/pulling-out-the-playbook/#commentsThu, 11 Nov 2010 15:40:15 +0000Tom Henhefferhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=156586RIM has finally unveiled a working demo of its rival to the iPad—the BlackBerry Playbook

Research In Motion has been locked in a bitter battle with tech rivals like Apple, but lately it seems shareholders couldn’t be happier. The company, which has been losing ground in the battle over smartphones, finally unveiled a working demo of its rival to the iPad—the BlackBerry Playbook—last Tuesday. Company co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis debuted the seven-inch, multi-touch tablet at the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles, showcasing its integrated camera for video conferencing, high-definition screen and full Flash support—all features the iPad has been criticized for lacking.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has dismissed the Playbook as being “too small,” but RIM shareholders seem to disagree. The device, which hits store shelves as early as next March and is marketed as the world’s first “professional” tablet, drove RIM stock up 5.8 per cent on Tuesday and 10 per cent overall last week.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/pulling-out-the-playbook/feed/5From e-books to no bookshttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/from-e-books-to-no-books/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/from-e-books-to-no-books/#commentsThu, 07 Oct 2010 18:20:07 +0000Stephanie Findlayhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=149946In the juggle of priorities on campus, books are falling off the shelf

Earlier this month, the University of Texas at San Antonio announced it had built the world’s first bookless library. Its Applied Engineering and Technology Library offers access to 425,000 e-books and 18,000 e-journal subscriptions, and librarians say they’ve yet to hear a complaint from the 350-plus students and faculty who pass through its doors daily. “We’ve gotten no negative feedback,” says Krisellen Maloney, library dean at the University of Texas. “We looked at circulation rates, we looked at electronic resources, we looked at requests, and we decided that having the services was more important than the physical books.” She adds bluntly: “When we prioritized the needs, the books weren’t the priority.”

It used to be that the size of a collection defined a library’s greatness, but now with access to online academic journals and e-books, a large physical collection doesn’t yield the same competitive advantage.

Now the bookless trend is taking hold in Canada, where more and more libraries are expanding their electronic resources. “My own institution has increased its holdings exponentially,” says Ernie Ingles, vice-provost and chief librarian at the University of Alberta and president of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL). “Virtually 90 per cent of our journals are electronic now, without print equivalents, and I believe we have approaching one million e-books in one kind or another.” Ingles says that all the members of CARL, including the University of British Columbia, the University of Ottawa and Dalhousie University, are moving in a similar direction.

However, Roger Schonfeld, research manager at Ithaka S+R, a non-profit research organization that focuses on the impact of digital media in academia, cautions that digital materials can be censored or restricted.

Recall in July 2009 when Amazon deleted copies of George Orwell’s novels Animal Farm and 1984 from people’s Kindle devices over a licensing spat with a publisher. Also, smaller universities with tighter budgets that can’t afford an electronic archive can find themselves in a precarious position. “What we’re discovering is yes, you buy the archive, but then you have to buy access to the platform that the archive sits on,” says Marie De­Young, university librarian at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. “You’re always paying money hand over fist to the publishers because they own the content and they frequently own how you access the content.”

But it’s not just about accessing the information, it’s how well students are able to navigate through it.

Since the Internet became ubiquitous, DeYoung’s role as a librarian has changed dramatically. In the past, DeYoung says she might have spent 10 or 15 minutes with a student, but now the average time has increased to an hour. “When they’re asking us for assistance, it’s not for the easy stuff anymore, it’s the hard stuff,” says DeYoung. Gohar Ashoughian, university librarian at the University of Northern British Columbia, is managing a pilot project called iRoam, which sees five librarians armed with iPads roaming the libraries acting as a “mobile reference service.” When students need help they can page a roaming librarian who will then come and provide support. Ashoughian says the pilot is a success.

Servicing readers is only one part of the library, though. “We’re in the business of preservation as well,” says Ingles, “making sure that these assets are available many, many years into the future.” Ingles says digital is no less ephemeral than print. He is working to address “bit rot”: the “digital medium itself will deteriorate over relatively short periods of time, five, 10, 15 years.”

But for all the easy access and quantity of online scholarship, Mitch Renaud, 21, in the third year of his composition music major at the University of Toronto, says there’s “a privilege to having a large library.”

Renaud, who frequents the music library, says, sure, there are holes in the collection, but “there’s quite a bit of that that is difficult to find online.” And while he enjoys accessing digital resources like Oxford’s Grove Music Online, he says that “a lot of learning a piece is to be able to write on the music, and make notes on interpretive things to do.” Laptops and the Kindle or iPad can’t replicate that—yet. Renaud adds: “There’s something about being in the Hart House library that would be lost sitting at home in front of a computer terminal.”

Still, without the library’s real estate being taken up by print, the University of Texas’s Maloney says the space is now full of students instead of books. “If you’re walking through any of our libraries, you see students studying all over the place,” says Maloney. “It’s the heart of the university.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/from-e-books-to-no-books/feed/0From e-books to no bookshttp://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/from-e-books-to-no-books-2/
http://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/from-e-books-to-no-books-2/#commentsTue, 05 Oct 2010 15:44:24 +0000Stephanie Findlayhttp://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/?p=16606In the juggle of priorities on campus, books are falling off the shelf

Last month, the University of Texas at San Antonio announced it had built the world’s first bookless library. Its Applied Engineering and Technology Library offers access to 425,000 e-books and 18,000 e-journal subscriptions, and librarians say they’ve yet to hear a complaint from the 350-plus students and faculty who pass through its doors daily. “We’ve gotten no negative feedback,” says Krisellen Maloney, library dean at the University of Texas. “We looked at circulation rates, we looked at electronic resources, we looked at requests, and we decided that having the services was more important than the physical books.” She adds bluntly: “When we prioritized the needs, the books weren’t the priority.”

It used to be that the size of a collection defined a library’s greatness, but now with access to online academic journals and e-books, a large physical collection doesn’t yield the same competitive advantage.

Now the bookless trend is taking hold in Canada, where more and more libraries are expanding their electronic resources. “My own institution has increased its holdings exponentially,” says Ernie Ingles, vice-provost and chief librarian at the University of Alberta and president of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL). “Virtually 90 per cent of our journals are electronic now, without print equivalents, and I believe we have approaching one million e-books in one kind or another.” Ingles says that all the members of CARL, including the University of British Columbia, the University of Ottawa and Dalhousie University, are moving in a similar direction.

However, Roger Schonfeld, research manager at Ithaka S+R, a non-profit research organization that focuses on the impact of digital media in academia, cautions that digital materials can be censored or restricted.

Recall in July 2009 when Amazon deleted copies of George Orwell’s novels Animal Farm and 1984 from people’s Kindle devices over a licensing spat with a publisher. Also, smaller universities with tighter budgets that can’t afford an electronic archive can find themselves in a precarious position. “What we’re discovering is yes, you buy the archive, but then you have to buy access to the platform that the archive sits on,” says Marie De­Young, university librarian at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. “You’re always paying money hand over fist to the publishers because they own the content and they frequently own how you access the content.”

But it’s not just about accessing the information, it’s how well students are able to navigate through it.

Since the Internet became ubiquitous, DeYoung’s role as a librarian has changed dramatically. In the past, DeYoung says she might have spent 10 or 15 minutes with a student, but now the average time has increased to an hour. “When they’re asking us for assistance, it’s not for the easy stuff anymore, it’s the hard stuff,” says DeYoung. Gohar Ashoughian, university librarian at the University of Northern British Columbia, is managing a pilot project called iRoam, which sees five librarians armed with iPads roaming the libraries acting as a “mobile reference service.” When students need help they can page a roaming librarian who will then come and provide support. Ashoughian says the pilot is a success.

Servicing readers is only one part of the library, though. “We’re in the business of preservation as well,” says Ingles, “making sure that these assets are available many, many years into the future.” Ingles says digital is no less ephemeral than print. He is working to address “bit rot”: the “digital medium itself will deteriorate over relatively short periods of time, five, 10, 15 years.”

But for all the easy access and quantity of online scholarship, Mitch Renaud, 21, in the third year of his composition music major at the University of Toronto, says there’s “a privilege to having a large library.”

Renaud, who frequents the music library, says, sure, there are holes in the collection, but “there’s quite a bit of that that is difficult to find online.” And while he enjoys accessing digital resources like Oxford’s Grove Music Online, he says that “a lot of learning a piece is to be able to write on the music, and make notes on interpretive things to do.” Laptops and the Kindle or iPad can’t replicate that—yet. Renaud adds: “There’s something about being in the Hart House library that would be lost sitting at home in front of a computer terminal.”

Still, without the library’s real estate being taken up by print, the University of Texas’s Maloney says the space is now full of students instead of books. “If you’re walking through any of our libraries, you see students studying all over the place,” says Maloney. “It’s the heart of the university.”

This year I’ve had an unusual number of requests by students who want the list of books for courses weeks before classes even begin. I’m not sure why this year is unusual, but I hope it has something to do with the enduring appeal of the book.

With the rise of the electronic book reader and the iPad, there has been renewed talk that the good old fashioned paper-bound book (what we scholars call a codex) will soon be obsolete. Like the phonograph or the stereoscope, the paper book will become a quaint remnant of a less-sophisticated time. Defenses of the book, on the other hand, tend to be based on whimsy (look at this new interactive, low-power, easy to use technology!) or practical (I don’t want to take my Kindle in the bath now, do I?).

But I think books will hang around for a different reason. They are beautiful.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPad and my fiancee can’t live without her Sony Reader (an ideal gift for the intellectual who travels a lot). But texts read on such devices have a technological uniformity that belies the uniqueness of every book. The beauty of a well-produced paper book is that, like the series of words that it contains, it is a unique creation. Every book has its own weight and feel and cover design and so on. And book lovers (consciously or not) are aware of the manifold choices the book makers have made in creating it. What kind of paper has been used? What type face? What about illustrations and figures? How is it bound?

I foresee the paper book becoming a kind of specialist item: still produced and known, but purchased and enjoyed mainly by aficionados. People still sail on sailboats not because they are the most modern vessels, but because they have an elegance and beauty that other craft cannot match. I think paper books will be more like sailboats than phonographs.

Professors are sometimes impatient with students who ask about books before classes start. Why can’t they just wait to get the syllabus on the first day of class like everyone else? But I understand the desire to get the books early. I was the same way when I was an undergraduate. I wanted to be in the bookstore and see the books piled high. I wanted to carefully peel the plastic wrappings off, to touch the paper, and arrange them carefully on my shelves. What can I say? I love books.

There is a danger, of course, in buying books early because one might get the wrong one (there are a lot of Introduction to Literature books), so students who do want an early start are wise to inquire. And I am always happy to reply. I hope they enjoy those books as much as I do.

Online bookseller Amazon generated big buzz when its Kindle e-reader went on sale for $399 in 2007. But the arrival of the iPad this year, with its full-colour touchscreen, e-reader and Internet-browsing capabilities, had the effect of making the Kindle and its black-and-white display seem dated literally overnight. As a result, Amazon and other makers of e-readers are now hoping their machines will find a comfortable home down-market. This week Amazon slashed the Kindle’s price by US$70 to US$189.

The price cut came on the same day as a similar move by bookstore Barnes & Noble, which reduced the price of its Nook e-reader by a comparable amount (to US$199). That means e-readers like the Kindle are now lot cheaper than Apple’s more functional iPad, which starts at US$499 ($549 in Canada). But it remains to be seen whether consumers think it’s still too much to pay for what increasingly looks like yesterday’s technology.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/at-home-down-market/feed/0With this app, I thee divorcehttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/with-this-app-i-thee-divorce/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/with-this-app-i-thee-divorce/#commentsMon, 28 Jun 2010 13:55:34 +0000Kate Lunauhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=134603DivorceApps.com aims at helping people who can't afford the services of a lawyer

Most people going through a divorce could probably do without the stress and expense of endless consultations with a lawyer. Now, some—in the U.S., anyway—can consult with their iPhones instead.

A new company out of Dallas, called DivorceApps.com, is selling iPhone applications aimed at helping people who “can’t afford the services of a lawyer and need to help themselves,” says family lawyer Michelle May O’Neil, its co-creator. O’Neil’s company, which launched in March, sells two apps through the iTunes store (both cost US$9.99). The Cost & Prep app helps people “calculate the hidden costs of divorce,” she says, from the “double cost of housing,” to extra kids’ clothes, down to “how much it costs to park at a lawyer’s office.” It also helps create a list of necessary documents, saving money on “the back-and-forth with a lawyer,” O’Neil says.

Another, called Estate Divider, helps couples keep track of who gets what, including alimony. More apps, like a calendar to help exes set the dates and times they take care of the kids, are on the way.

Lorne MacLean, managing partner of MacLean Family Law Group in Vancouver, doesn’t know of any divorce apps tailored to Canadian law—yet. “We’re looking at creating an iPhone and an iPad app,” he says, to help people understand the process of divorce, get articles and updates on developments in the law, and provide tips for better results.

Maybe because they’re so new, divorce apps don’t seem to have sparked a backlash in the legal community. People in Canada can, in some cases, get divorced without a lawyer, but the apps’ designers insist their creations aren’t meant to eliminate lawyers from the process, only to make it simpler. In fact, some lawyers are using them, too. Jimmy Verner, a Texas lawyer who created a child-support calculator app, says he’s heard of lawyers using his app in court, “walking up to the bench and saying, ‘Here’s how much [my client] should owe.’ ”

When O’Neil got an iPhone, “it seemed there were so few apps [with] real-world applications,” she says. With the iPad and iPhone 4G, the divorce app category is expected to grow. For many people, after all, divorce is as real as it gets.

When they enter university, freshman are often told that with all the social and educational opportunities before them, the world is at their fingertips. But, while online educational resources have given new understanding to that phrase, just within the past year it takes on an even more literal meaning.

At Seton Hill, a Catholic liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, the new catchphrase is “An iPad for everyone.” On March 30, the school made headlines as the first in North America to announce it would put the latest Apple touch technology in the hands of its new recruits—at no cost to them. “The iPad will lighten the backpacks of Seton Hill University students,” said president JoAnne Boyle in a release from the school. The school hopes Apple’s iBook application will allow students to ditch the heavy textbooks they lug around, and even make carrying a pen and paper unnecessary.

The initiative is part of the Griffin (the school’s mascot) Technology Advantage the school promotes to entice students. Not only will freshman receive an iPad for the first time this fall, but the school is also handing out brand new 13” Macbooks as part of the all-encompassing technology program, which upper-year students can opt in to for $500 a semester.

And while Seton Hill is the first American institution to announce it would gift iPads this fall, it isn’t the first American institution to offer Apple handouts to new students. In 2008, Abilene Christian University, in Abilene Texas, began offering iPhones or iPod Touch devices to its incoming freshman, citing at the time students’ ability to use them for “homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors’ offices, and check their meal and account balances.”

George Fox University in Oregon also announced it will give first-year students the choice of scoring a new iPad instead of the MacBook the school normally gives out. The price is offset in tuition, but students get to keep their new device when they graduate.

Though it may just be the latest incentive to drive recruitment at some U.S. schools, Canadian students may be feeling left in the digital dark age. With the buzz created over the possibilities of the iPad in academia, the question is whether it will prove to be a valuable education tool. And is the attention the new device is getting south of the border a sign Canadian schools are falling behind in learning technology innovation?

The answer, simply, is ‘No,’ said Ken Coates, dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Waterloo. Coates recently chaired the learning stream of the Canada 3.0 conference on digital media, held in Stratford, Ont.—the birthing grounds of Waterloo’s newest satellite campus designed to house niche programs in digital media and global business. He said even though the traditional approach to education is still a recent memory in the minds of most Canadians, the country isn’t lagging in a race towards digital academic innovation.

“I think we’re pretty much on the curb with other countries,” Coates said. “It’s a hundred yard race, and now we have one foot out of the starting block.” Coates said while there is no doubt students would be happy with the latest Apple technology, the nature of the Canadian university system functions much differently than the for-profit attitudes of some American schools. In fact, he said, the idea of handing out the latest in technology is not a new concept, even to Canadians.

At Acadia University in Nova Scotia, the technology advantage program saw the incorporated use of notebook computers loaned out by the school as part a blended learning approach more than a decade ago.

But, Coates said, the focus for Canada and the 3.0 conference was to take the thousands of projects happening in the country today and collaborate on how to move forward to meet student demands for digital, accessible and virtual learning. “Our country needs to make a huge move into this space if we’re going to be competitive in the 21st century,” he said. But, he said in the process of giving students the learning opportunities they want, the real concern becomes: “Can we ensure that the learning occurs with the level and with the intensity that we expect?”

While university is supposed to encompass a certain aspect of experimentation, the real purpose of higher learning is to be intellectually challenging, Coates said. “Technology lets you do that, but the idea of post-secondary education is that you don’t just turn students over, but you guide them.” And while the iPad is nice piece of hardware, Coates said what’s important to remember when moving learning-specific technology forward is that every program and course can’t be fulfilled by one blanket solution. What might work for teaching an English class won’t suffice for a chemistry lab, Coates said.

The SketchBook Pro app on the iPad may be an advantage for design and arts students, but for chemistry students, beyond displaying the periodic table and other reference matierials, it isn’t an asset for lab work.

Program-specific tech may be the way forward for Canada’s innovators, but Blackboard Inc. mobile developer Aaron Wasserman said offering students the flexibility of having learning materials wherever they are is a growing expectation of today’s student, American or Canadian. “It’s very natural that they would expect to be able to get academic information . . . on-the-go,” Wasserman said. “That is a commonality.”

Still a student at Stanford University, Wasserman developed an iPhone application called iStanford, which provided his peers with at-hand course material, as well as content on school life, such as transit schedules and the latest in campus news. When Blackboard, who specializes in learning management systems in North America acquired Wasserman’s design and expertise, they turned the iStanford model into Mobile Central, so the technology could be retrofitted to schools who sought the system for their students.

But Brian Lamb, manager of emerging technologies and digital content at the University of British Columbia, said while handout technology and mobile apps are impressive, most don’t serve to improve student learning. “They seemed to be geared towards recruitment and student life as opposed to enhancing learning and education,” Lamb said. “They’re shiny and they’re fun to use . . . but I do worry a little bit that we might be reinforcing a new kind of Internet,” Lamb said.

He said in a way, incorporating and investing closed-content devices like the iPad into higher education would not only be a waste of public resources, but would take a step back from open education and nationwide collaboration the federal government promoted and funded in the early 2000s. “When I entered this field in 2002, there really was something like national strategy happening in online learning,” Lamb said. “It would be nice to see something like that again.”

Lamb said these collaborations lost momentum with the Paul Martin administration. After his term in office, in 2006 and 2007, Industry Canada released two strategies—Advantage Canada and Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage—to enhance science and technology infrastructure and innovation and included a focus on advancing learning in universities.

Industry Minister Tony Clement was a keynote speaker at the Canada 3.0 conference. In his address he announced the country’s newest Digitial Economy strategy, which puts an emphasis on digital technologies. “I don’t need to remind this audience how important these new tools can be—to propelling our economic growth and enhancing our quality of life,” Clement said during his speech at the conference. “Already, these technologies are transforming the way we communicate, run our businesses, conduct commerce. They’re revolutionizing how medical professionals keep us healthy, how research is done and how students learn.”

As far as the gap in technology between Canada and the U.S., Lamb said from his experience at conferences in emerging technology, Canadian institutions usually have a strong innovative presence. “I think Canada stacks up reasonably well,” he said. In some ways, thanks to the smaller number of institutions, Lamb said Canada has greater possibilities to collaborate on best practices in learning technology and learn from one another, an advantage the U.S. doesn’t have. “We can actually know who all each other are,” Lamb said. “And that’s impossible in the United States.”

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been a hot topic on tech blogs lately for something other than the iPad: his emails. Responding to frustrated Apple users and fans alike, Jobs’s terse responses to emails sent to his work address—sjobs@apple.com—are being republished online by excited recipients.

While most are one-word replies to questions about Apple products, Jobs has been stringing together more elaborate responses of late. In March, when asked whether the iPad will support Google’s Picasa library format, Jobs replied with a light jab: “No, but iPhoto on the Mac has much better faces and places features.”

When a blogger complained last month that the iPad was taking too long to get to Europe, a reply from Jobs lay waiting in his inbox the next morning: “Are you nuts?” wrote Jobs. “We are doing the best we can. We need enough units to have a responsible and great launch.”

Apple’s boss also responded in April to a letter writer from Cupertino, Calif., who wrote to thank Jobs for supporting a California bill that would create a live kidney donor registry. The writer’s 24-year-old girlfriend had died as a result of liver failure. Jobs, who underwent a liver transplant in 2008, wrote back: “Your [sic] most welcome, James. I’m sorry about your girlfriend. Life is fragile.” In an article about the exchange, tech writer Dan Frommer at Business Insider said Jobs’s email “further endeared him to millions of people.”

Toronto-based author and professor Don Tapscott, who specializes in corporate governance, business strategy and transparency, is intrigued by Jobs’s behaviour, but skeptical. “I applaud these very initial steps to be more transparent, to open up the company, and to engage with his market and stakeholders,” he says. “But so far, they’re baby steps.” Others are frustrated that this has resulted in any good publicity for Jobs at all. One commenter on Business Insider described Frommer’s post as “blatant, unapologetic fanboyism at its absolute worst.”